


Bright Day

by Adrenalineshots



Category: Prodigal Son (TV 2019)
Genre: Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Gen, Homophobia, Hurt Malcolm Bright, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Kidnapping, Language, M/M, Mentions of Necrophilia, Non-Consensual Somnophilia, Non-Explicit, Nudity, Past Child Abuse, Serial Killers, Violence, Whump, serial killers are not nice people
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:21:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 35,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23484508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adrenalineshots/pseuds/Adrenalineshots
Summary: Malcolm gets himself grabbed by yet another serial killer. The problem is, this one manages to make John Watkins look like a choir boy.
Comments: 144
Kudos: 246





	1. Chapter 1

So, here was the burning question of hour: what did you get when you crossed a Machiavellian personality with a tyrannical sadist?

The psychologist in him was truly fascinated. On one hand, there was the manipulative, amoral side that derived its pleasure from puppeteering others into doing his biding, while on the other, there was a compulsion to cause pain and humiliation in the most violent, direct manner to satisfy his needs.

The regular person part of him, the one who woke up to find himself strapped to a chair, wearing nothing but his underwear, in a cold, dark, abandoned warehouse in the middle of fuck-no-where?

_That_ part was having a really shitty day.

Gil was going to _kill_ him when he found out that Bright had somehow managed to get himself grabbed by yet another serial killer. That is... if he managed to survive long enough for the Lieutenant to find him.


	2. Chapter 2

-ºº-

The first victim had been found only two days before by the docks, near the shadiest part of the river. A young man in his early thirties, five foot six, slender built and, apart from being dead, healthy.

According to Edrisa, official cause of death had been the good old cardiac arrest, but taking in account the amount of obvious signs of torture that the body exhibited, it was hard to figure which trauma had led to the arrest itself, since the victim had no previous heart conditions- yes, she had checked.

“See these marks here and here,” she explained, gloved finger pointing at different sections of the body, “the several pigmentation shades around the wrists and ankles suggest that the victim was kept in restrains for quite some time. The same thing for the contusions around the torso and legs, suggesting multiple hits with a blunt object over the course of hours, days even. Also stomach content and skin elasticity showed that he was given no food or water for at least two days before his death.”

“Which was?”

“I'd say in between thirty six to forty two hours ago.”

“Any signs of sexual assault?” Gil hated to ask, but given that the body had been found completely naked and posed in a rather... sexual manner, he needed to know for sure.

The medical examiner paused, face contorting in a expression of deep frustration. “Unclear,” she confessed, the inability to give a concrete answer clearly grinding against her sense of professionalism. “With the amount of bruising present in every inch of the victim's body... I did find _some_ traces of semen, but the sample was so degraded that it was impossible to tell how long it had been there, if it belong to the killer or even the victim himself.”

The lieutenant sighed, turning to his team instead. Malcolm, in particular, had been uncharacteristically quiet so far. “How are we on identifying the victim?”

JT shook his head. “No luck yet, boss,” he let out. “No reports of missing people fitting his description, no police record from his prints, no dental records on file, _nada_... the guy's a complete ghost.”

“Crime Scene Unit found no traces of absolutely _nothing_ on the location, which tells us that this killer knows his stuff,” Dani pitched in. “They called in the dogs to do a swipe of the place... found five more bodies, several degrees of decay between them,” she added with a stern look in her eyes. That level of violence in that had been inflicted on that one victim was bad enough; to know that this was the work of a killer with several more victims just made it all the more terrifying.

Gil's lips were nothing but a thin white line under his goatee. “Bright, any thoughts you'd like to share?”

“He didn't touch the victim's face,” the profiler let out, the words coming straight from some stream of thoughts he had been chasing inside his head.

“ _He_?” Gil pressed.

Malcolm blinked, finally peeling his eyes away from the victim to look at them, as if noticing their presence for the first time. “Well, yes,” he said matter of factly, because that seemed like the most obvious thing to him. “White male, older than the victim, late forties perhaps, physically imposing and easily capable of subduing the victim, probably only now dealing with his own sexuality, most likely with a history of violence,” he shot out in quick succession.

JT gave him a dubious look. “You got all that from the fact that the killer left the victim's face alone?”

Malcolm actually smiled, eager to explain. “Look at the victim,” he invited them, like they hadn't been doing exactly that for the past fifteen minutes. “Well shaped face, full lips, round, small nose, long lashes... the victim was a good looking man, a man the killer felt himself attracted to at some level.” He paused, walking around the metallic table, surveying the victim like he was trying to see the dead man in a different angle. The killer's point of view. “Now, either the victim denied the killer's advances and the rejection set off the attack, or the killer is, most likely, struggling with his feelings towards other men. But,” he quickly added, barely registering their looks of agreement, “during all the time that he held him captive, the killer never sought out to destroy the very thing that set off the attack, the victim's looks.”

“And why do you think he did that?”

Bright's smile grew deeper. “Isn't it obvious?” he stated, even though, no, it wasn't obvious at all. “The face is the center of all emotional response. Everything we think, everything we _feel_ , is promptly telegraphed through our facial expressions, through our eyes,” he pointed out, his own eyes sparkling wildly with excitement. “The killer needed to keep that feedback free of corruption and degradation, to be able to read the victim's reactions to what he was doing to him. So he could enjoy it better.”

“Sick bastard,” JT let out through clenched teeth.

“The worst kind,“ Malcolm agreed. “We're dealing with the most dreadful kind of sadist possible,” he voiced. “A tyrannical sadist, a killer who gets his kicks from causing as much degradation and horror on his victims as he possibly can before he ultimately breaks them.”

Edrisa's eyes widened, looking at the profiler like he had just cracked the secret to the Coca Cola formula. “Cardiac arrest... when the body could not take the abuse any longer, the victim simply gave up!”

Malcolm nodded solemnly, giving her a sad smile. “And we need to find him before his next victim does the same.”

-ºº-

The expression _freezing balls_ had never felt quite so literal to Malcolm until now. It was hard to keep track of time in the dark, but he was pretty sure that hours had gone by since he'd regained his senses. And it was cold. Oh, so very cold.

He had spent those initial moments doing the obvious, despite the fact that his own profile of the killer told him that the man was too meticulous to leave anything to chance, least of all restrains.

Still, Bright had to try.

Nylon climbing rope. Very little give-way, zero chance of rubbing it broken against the edge of the chair, and wound around his wrists and ankles so tightly that Malcolm could barely feel his hands and feet.

The metallic chair was bolted straight into the concrete floor, and no amount of wiggling made it nudge a single inch. Also, the metal seem to drain away every ounce of heat that Malcolm managed to produce, making it feel like he was sitting on a block of ice. On top of everything else, his ass was growing seriously numb.

He had tried screaming for help. That had kept him warm for a good couple of minutes. Other than that, it had been pointless. The sound of his screams was utterly lost in the vastness of the place, momentarily bouncing off the piles of crates and abandoned machinery before ebbing away into nothingness.

With his options reduced to nothing else but sit and wait, Malcolm's brain turned, as it often did, to profiling.

Everything in the whole set up he found himself in told him something about the killer, information that he collected and saved for later.

The large, dark space, designed to make him feel small and vulnerable. Isolated. Cut off from any possibility of escape or help.

Was that how the killer felt on a regular day? One would assume that he needed some form of source of income for his regular life. It might be that he worked in a large place, a big corporate company perhaps, his role being small and beneath what he perceived to be his higher qualifications, making him feel both small and trapped.

The nudity in the freezing cold environment, serving the dual purpose of humiliating and keeping Malcolm as uncomfortable as possible.

Had someone humiliated the killer badly enough to break his psych? Most bullying happened during school years, so perhaps that trauma could be traced back there. But what had caused the bullying? Some form of dysmorphia? A lower social positioning in relation to the other kids? _A serial killer father_?

Malcolm let out a bitter laugh, as his own broken psych tried to sneak into the killer's profile. Even as the last remains of laughter were lost in the dark, it fleetingly occurred to him that maybe he wasn't dealing with the whole situation as well as he thought he was.

His back hurt.

The way he was tied to the chair was designed for the very same purpose of humiliation and discomfort as the lack of clothes. While most would just use the chair's arms and legs to restrain a person, this killer had gone to the trouble of binding Malcolm's right hand to his right foot, left hand to left foot, interlacing the rope in between on the cross rails at the back of the chair.

What it did was force the the whole front side of profiler to arch out, as his shoulders were pulled back in order for the tip of his fingers to reach his ankles. Posed like he was offering himself to whatever happened next.

It was meant to feel degrading, to press home just how vulnerable his situation was and, after a while in that same position, it fucking _hurt_.

The way the ropes were laced together was allusive of the Japanese Kinbaku, mostly known as bondage in the BDSM community. Malcolm had no doubt that seeing his victims posed like that gave the killer a higher sense of power over them and no doubt a degree of sexual satisfaction.

That part was purely sexual sadism, but in this case, there was no sense of shared pleasure taken by two partners, only a selfish fulfillment of what the killer wanted and needed with no regards for the comfort or consent from the other unwilling participant.

Guess that answered Gil's question about the sexual assault, Bright figured out with no small amount of disgust and a whole shitload of trepidation.

The profiler looked down at his black boxer briefs, the only thing still separating him from complete exposure. He knew that all the other bodies had been found naked, which meant that the presence of his own underwear at the moment had to be a part of the ritual. Either the killer felt conflicted with the sight of male genitalia, or it was just another form of domination, wanting to establish that he was the one in control over everything, even the degree of nudity involved.

Either option sucked, which caused Malcolm to break out in a cold sweat as he forced himself not to panic.

On the other hand... maybe he could use that to his advantage. The longer it took for the killer to... achieve his goals, the better a chance Malcolm had to come out of this alive and _relatively_ unscathed.

He just needed to last long enough for the team to find him. He could do that.

“Has anyone ever tell you,” a voice suddenly emerged from the dark, “that you talk in your sleep?”

Malcolm shuddered in his seat, his whole skin erupting into gooseflesh. He hadn't heard a single noise alerting him to the killer's presence. No door opening, no footsteps, nothing at all. Which meant that the killer had been there with him that whole time.

Watching.

Learning.

Cataloguing.

Profiling him.

Well. _Shit_.


	3. Chapter 3

-ºº-

“His name was Juan Javier Martinez,” JT proudly announced, pinning the information on their white board with a certain degree of satisfaction. “Thirty one years old, Spanish citizen, freshly arrived to the US last week with a L1 Visa, was due to start working at the Global Interchange Company this week,” he let out in quick succession. “His boss finally filed a missing persons' report today when Martinez didn't show up for work three days in a row.”

Gil perked up at that. So far, they had had no luck whatsoever in identifying the rest of the killer's victims. It suddenly clicked that the reason why none of them had been in the missing person files, or any other file for that matter, was because they had been searching the wrong database. It was a long shot, based on nothing more than a tidbit of information on a single victim and a monumental gut-feeling, but if the killer was actually picking his victims from newly-arrivals on the US... “JT, Dani, search the FBI and Interpol's database for missing people. See if any of them matches the information we have on the other bodies.”

“On it, boss!”

A few hours later, their board was finally looking like something more than a white void. All six victims laid out side to side, named and with matching pictures of what they had looked like when alive.

It was impossible not to see the similarities between the victims. All young men, ranging from twenty nine to thirty three years old, different hair and eye color, but all of them undeniably good looking. Gil's hunch had been deadly accurate too; all of them had been newcomers to the States, all dead within forty eight hours after arriving. No friends or family in the country; no connections between themselves.

“Their countries of origin don't match,” Dani pointed out, staring at the board with the rest of the team. “We have a French, two British, a Spanish, a Australian and a Italian... maybe he just has a thing against foreigners?” she suggested with a shrug.

Malcolm shook his head. “I don't think so. He's picking them based on what he likes, not for something that he hates,” he explained. “The fact that they are newly arrivals in a strange country just makes them easy targets. No one to miss them, no one to look for them. It also makes it easier to control them; they have no where to run.”

“There's also the fact that first five were put into graves,” JT reminded them. “Did he just got lazy with the last victim? Maybe someone interrupted before he could actually bury him?”

It was a valid question.

“I don't think he was interrupted,” the profiler said, his eyes drifting to the evidence photos on the board, cruelly depicting in vivid colors how the body had been found. Face down on the ground, legs spread out and his hands tied behind his back. “No, he placed the victim _exactly_ like he wanted... which means he's evolving,” he added, looking away from the disturbing images. “Burying the bodies of the first victims showed that he had some level of care and respect for the dead. Leaving his victim like this, exposed, in the open...” Malcolm paused, taking a deep breath. His right hand started shaking, reminding him that the Surgeon used to leave his victims in the open too, so that everyone could appreciate his handy craft. “He wants us to see what he did to these men, how he transformed them. He's seeking recognition for his work.”

The team fell silent. They had caught the profiler's clumsy attempt at hiding his tremor, all of them by now more than familiar with his stress signs and what caused them. “Did Edrisa have any luck with the other victims' corpses?” Gil asked, redirecting their line of thought.

“Cause of death is all over the place,” JT's let out, frustration bringing his voice two tones down. Nothing in this case seemed to be straightforward. “Three of the victims died of _stress induced cardiac arrest due to multiple signs of trauma_ , just like our first victim,” he read directly from the file. “But the other two... single gunshot wound to the head. And here's the kicker,” he paused, flipping through the coroner's report. “' _Bullet trajectory inside the wound strongly suggests self-inflicted gunshot'..._ I mean, what the fuc- _”_

The ringing phone cut through the detective's words, the room falling silent as Gil picked up. “Arroyo.”

There was no need for fancy profiling skills for any of them to guess what was being said on the other side of the line. They knew it even as the Lieutenant's eyes closed and a deep frown descended upon his face before he hang up. “They found another one.”

-ºº-

The newest victim had been found a mile down from the place they had found the last six, posed in a manner similar to Martinez.

“We forced him to change his dumpsite,” Malcolm pointed out. From where they stood, they could barely see the white coveralls from the CSU officers still working the previous crime scene, but they all knew that they were still there. “And from the looks of it, he took out his frustration on the victim.”

The profiler was right. There was an amount of savagery present in the latest body that they had not seen before, like the killer had lost sight of his purpose and had descended into pure animal rage.

“You're absolutely right!” Edrisa agreed happily, stealing a flirty look before getting back to business. “It's the first time we see compound fractures this severe in his victims,” she said, pointing out towards the victim's left arm and right leg, “which suggests either a massive blow of considerable strength or multiple hits applied on the same spot.”

Malcolm knelt by the body. “It also means that the killer is watching us,” he pointed out, causing everyone else to involuntarily look around, searching for anyone out of place. The only faces they found, however, belonged to the NYPD. “Which makes sense, because if he's going through all of this trouble to display his victims in this particular form, he'd want to see people's reaction to his work.”

“You think he's watching us now?” JT asked, his right hand casually slipping closer to his gun.

Malcolm looked up, slowly realizing that he and Edrisa were the only ones still focused on the victim. All others had their eyes out, searching the woods surrounding that stretch of the river for an invisible foe.

“If he is,” he pointed out, “he's doing it from a safe distance, nowhere that we can spot him. Maybe using some high range binoculars from across the river, a hidden WiFi camera somewhere near this area, maybe even some sort of recording device that he can pick up later...”

“If there's a camera somewhere near, the signal has to be going somewhere,” JT picked up immediately, his phone already in hand. “I'll have the guys from tech search for all frequencies coming in and out of this area.”

Gil nodded in approval, his eyes descending upon the victim. Seven bodies on his hands and yet they stood no closer to finding this guy. The newspapers had already taken hold of the story, calling this killer the Bone-Crusher and having no qualms about pointing out the NYPD's inadequacy in catching him. “Any thoughts on how he's getting to his victims?”

“GQ's magazine?” Dani offered, more out of despair than jest.

Malcolm carefully placed the victim's right hand back on the floor before getting to his feet, pushing his gloved hands inside his pockets. It was getting damn cold. “Actually, I have an idea,” he let out with a toothy smile. “How bad you do think traffic will be to JFK's at this hour?”

-ºº-

Malcolm took a deep breath, trying to hide just how off balance he'd been thrown by the killer's silent presence in the dark. He should have known that he had to be somewhere inside the warehouse, watching. It was all part of his need to manipulate people, of his method to control the victims, to keep track of the prey.

The profiler, however, was not in the mood to play the perfect prey for this guy. “I do a lot more than talking when I sleep,” Malcolm hissed out, not bothering to hide the threatening tone lacing his choice of words. Bright dared not show it, but it was bothering him the fact that he could hear the killer talking but had yet to see him. The man was keeping himself to the shadows on purpose, keeping Malcolm guessing how close he was, what he was going to do next. “Did I say anything interesting?” he said casually, like he was asking about the weather outside.

“Not to me,” the killer deadpanned. “Do you know why you're here?”

Malcolm paused. Somehow, he doubted that the answer the killer was looking for was ' _because you're a psychopathic sadist with Machiavellian tendencies who made his first mistake when you assumed that I was easy prey_?' “Because you kidnapped me and brought me here?” he said instead.

It was the sad truth. The team had been going on the theory that the killer worked somewhere near or at JFK Airport itself, giving him easy access to whomever came out from international flights. What they couldn't figure out was how the killer knew which passengers were traveling alone and which ones had someone expecting them.

He had kind of stumbled across the answer to that as he took a cab home.

“This isn't your first time,” the killer sounded genuinely surprised, a degree of satisfaction clear in his voice. “You've been in a situation similar to this before,” he guessed all to accurately. “How... _peculiar_.”

Malcolm silently fumed, kicking himself for having sound too nonchalant. It was a difficult balance to strike, between sounding submissively enough and not too fearless, to keep the killer appeased and still manage to hold on to some degree of self-preservation.

He should have known better than to give himself away like that. Regular, _normal_ people sounded scared shitless when faced with that sort of question in that _particular_ kind of situation, not flippant about their own safety like he had. The irony, of course, resided in the fact that, being scared shitless had been exactly why Malcolm had made such a rookie mistake. He had just given the killer an edge that he could not afford.

He could hear the killer walking closer, his steps measured and heavy, a slight scuffing against the floor from one his shoes. The left one. Arthritis? An old injury, perhaps? Malcolm forced himself not to squirm or turn his head around, unwilling to give the killer any more victories.

“You're here because I chose _you_ , because I decided that you deserved better,” the killer said, his voice deep and close enough now to cause the fine hair on Bright's neck to stand on attention.

“Better than what?”

The killer ignored his question, stepping into the light for the first time. Malcolm had only gotten a fleeting glimpse of the cab driver, but he was pretty sure it was the same guy. He had the same white peppered hair, caught in the back in a short ponytail.

Now that he was standing in front of him, rather than cramped in the front seat of a cab, Malcolm could see that he was an imposing guy. Taller than JT, with broad shoulders that almost compensated the extra pounds around his waist. He was still dressed in the ratty training suit that he'd been wearing in the taxi, the smell of sweat and old cigarettes pouring off from the synthetic fabric like a swarm of bees.

In his right hand he was carrying a metallic, cheap baseball bat. In his left, a gun.

Malcolm eyed the items in the killer's hands with a growing sense of dread. He knew where this was going. He had seen the end results in the bodies at the morgue.

“Obviously, there is a choice to be made here,” the killer announced, his voice cold and detached even as he reveled on the fact that he had Malcolm's undivided attention. “But, like with everything in life, you need to earn the right to choose.”

The profiler swallowed, biding his time. If his choices were a baseball bat and a gun, he wasn't exactly eager to pick either. “And what am I supposed to do to earn that right?”

The killer eyed him carefully, brown eyes crinking at the corners “Oh, nothing that will cause you too much hardship,” he paused, allowing enough time to pass for Malcolm to fill in the blanks. “I ask a question,” he finally explained. “Answer truthfully and you get to pick which item I use. It's all a part of your... _leaning curve_.”

_I emerged a new man after my trials... and so will you, if you survive!_

That voice,  _ Watkins' _ voice, sounded so loud and clear inside Malcolm's head that he shuddered in his seat, expecting to see the other man come out from the dark to join in. Bright's fingertips brushed against the hair of his leg as his hand started shaking against his will.

_ John Watkins is in jail _ , the profiler reminded himself, taking a deep, calming breath. Now was not the time to lose it over a killer who had already been dealt with. Now was the time do deal with the one standing right in front of him, no doubt studying his every reaction, soaking up his involuntary responses to a memory and probably assuming that this was all about him.

Bright studied the man in return, ignoring the eerie rustling of chains against concrete inside his head, and focusing on the killer's reactions instead. The sharp contraction of the man's pupils, the involuntary movement of tongue across his bottom lip, the fingers tightening around the handle of the metallic bat. As much as the killer was trying to play it casual, his body betrayed how much pleasure this twisted sort of game gave him.

“And if I refuse?” Malcolm asked, defiantly.

The killer gave him a smile, his gaze traveling to the items in his hands longingly. “If you don't... I'll just use both.”

-ºº-


	4. Chapter 4

-ºº-

It had started to rain outside, water pelting against the roof of the warehouse like popcorn in the microwave. It was probably psychosomatic, but Malcolm couldn't help but feel the cold seep deeper into his skin, making him shiver so hard that he felt like his teeth would start to clatter any time soon. In front of him, the killer took a step closer, clearly done with waiting for an answer. “Okay!” he let out in a rushed breath, effectively stopping the killer's advance. “Okay... look, I'm sure you have your reasons for doing... _whatever_ it is that you're doing here,” Malcolm let out slowly, skipping denial and anger and going straight for bargaining. “But have you considered that you might have the wrong guy? I mean, do you even know who I am? _I certainly_ don't know who you are, so you could just let m-”

The baseball bat moved so quickly that the only indication Malcolm ever had that it had moved at all, was the thundering sound it made as it hit the floor, right beside his left hand. Concrete flew on impact, tiny bits pelting against the exposed skin of his leg. Like rain.

“Don't play games with me, boy!” the killer hissed, the carefully maintained control he had displayed so far, gone out the window. “Do I look _stupid_ to you?” he spat, grinding his words, nostrils flaring, face growing a deeper shade of red.

Didn't take a profiler to see that he was not happy.

“I'm sor--”

Malcolm gasped, whatever he was going to say next seeming pointless as the baseball bat swiveled again, this time stopping short of crushing his throat. Despite having no where to go, he leaned back unconsciously, ineffectually trying to put some distance between the weapon and his skin.

The killer took a deep breath, letting it out slowly as he struggled to regain his composure, keeping the bat in place. “I know that you're not like the others, but for the sake of our future dealings, let's get something straight here from the get go,” he voiced, pressing the bat just a little bit harder in the profiler's neck. “If you try to make a fool out of me, _I'll know_. If you try to trick me, _I'll know_. If you try any of your psychology bullshit on me, _I will know_ , Malcolm Bright!” he listed, each rule pressed home by a violent jab of the bat against the profiler's neck before pulling away with a final lunge.

Malcolm coughed and gasped, his lungs confused on whether air was coming in or out. The position his arms were tied already made it hard to expand his chest muscles and take a proper lung-full of air as it were; adding that amount of pressure on his throat had left the tied up man panting for air, feeling like nothing was getting in, heart racing out of control as the edges of the world started closing in.

It took him a few minutes to get his breathing under control. And to register that the killer had called him by name.

Bright blinked away the moister that had gathered unceremoniously in his eyes, looking at the killer in a different light.

It was something that had been nagging him at back of his mind, the fact that he didn't fit with the rest of the killer's victimology. Malcolm wasn't new to the country, or the city for that matter; he had been born there, lived in New York for most of his life. And he had connections, people who would be looking for him.

He wan't forgetting about the physical aspect of the killer's choice of victim, of course. Malcolm knew, at some level, that he had some physical attributes that pleased both women and men. But being good looking was not the killer's main objective when picking a victim; he needed someone vulnerable, someone he could control, someone defenseless.

Bright had initially imagined that the killer could have just confused him for a traveler because he had picked him up at the airport. But the profiler hadn't been carrying any luggage when he walked out and he hadn't been holding any papers.

Papers.

That had been the one clue that had taken him straight to the airport -yesterday? earlier that day?-, when they had found the seventh victim. The fact that the last two men had traces of ink on the fingertips of their right hands. Going through Customs and Immigration was a stressful process for almost everyone, and most people when stressed, got sweaty hands. Which, in turn soaked in ink from any paper the men had been holding at the time. Namely, their immigration papers.

Malcolm hadn't looked like an immigrant, and the killer had been all too aware of that fact. Like they had seen so far with this serial killer, no mistake had been made.

The killer had picked him because he knew _exactly_ who Malcolm was. Because, as Bright had predicted, the man had in fact been observing the crime scenes closely, watching the team at work, probably even listening to their conversations -because how else would he have learned that Bright was a psychologist?- getting more and more furious as they ruined his work by giving the victims some dignity back.

The killer wasn't after his next thrill. He wanted retribution.

“It won't happen again,” Malcolm promised, his voice raspy and breaking from the abuse, his gaze steady and unwavering as he met the killer's eyes. “You know my name... what should I call you?”

The killer took a step back, clearly appeased by the profiler's subdue tone. “You may address me as the Professor,” he offered, pleased with the show of interest. “Are you ready for your question? Or should we just skip to the end?” he bluntly said, bat thrown casually over his shoulder and gun crammed in the waistband of his grey training pants.

Malcolm chewed on his bottom lip, trying to gain some time. Asking a question had seemed harmless enough when he believed that the kille- the _Professor_ \- was following his usual MO. The revelation that he was aware of Malcolm's connection with the police put a whole different weight on what he could afford to answer and the things he needed to keep silent about. Ultimately, it all depended on whether the killer liked what he heard or not.

“Yes, I'm ready,” Malcolm voiced. “What do you want to know?”

The Professor took his time, walking to a nearby crate and sitting before opening his mouth. “I want to know what scares you the most.”

The profiler paused, not sure if he had heard right. He had been preparing himself for some kind of question related to the investigation, thinking of ways to answer without giving anything away. No killer wanted to be caught, despite what popular opinion might assume about serial killers. They enjoyed killing, they were _good_ at killing people, perfecting their technique over time, improving themselves with each kill... none of them was ever eager to have the police cut off their source of entertainment.

And yet, this one showed no concern over how close the police might be to catching him, no curiosity on whether he had made a mistake that might lead the NYPD to his doorstep. Which meant that he was evolving once again, getting cockier, leaving behind the low risk victims and trying his new-found skills on a high risk one. The NYPD's profiler.

The question was overly personal, which Malcolm figured to be the whole point of the endeavor. After the Professor's explosive reaction to his previous attempt at bullshitting him, the profiler knew that he couldn't get away with answers like ' _spiders_ ' or ' _my mother's cooking_ '. While both were true, they weren't what the killer was looking for.

To answer truthfully would open a can of worms about his father that Bright had absolutely no desire to share with the Professor, so he needed to come up with something in between, something that would sound real enough for the killer.

He carefully weighted what he had surmised about the Professor so far. A man who, despite being obviously smart, still desperately craved recognition as being the smartest person in the room. He called himself the Professor, a term that implied higher education, and yet he worked as a taxi driver, which either meant that he had once had aspirations of becoming a teacher and, for whatever reason, had failed to achieve his goal, or that he was a teacher but couldn't find someone to hire him in his profession.

Malcolm was inclined to assume that the Professor came from a low-income family, never having the financial liberty to get a higher education, unfairly robbed of his full potential because he had no money to pay for a degree.

Adding to that frustration, there were his conflicted feelings about being attracted to men, something that he probably saw as personally embarrassing, something to improve and repress. And he had repressed it for all of his life, because Malcolm had easily spotted the large golden band of a wedding ring on the Professor's left hand. Which meant that somewhere out there, there was a wife who had absolutely no idea what her husband did in his free time.

_Very much like your mother,_ the dark corner of Malcolm's mind, the one that sounded an awful lot like Martin Whitly, reminded him.

“Come on, it's an easy enough question,” the Professor prodded, growing impatient at the delay. “Everyone has that one thing that they fear the most. What's yours?”

“Failure,” Malcolm rushed out. It was a common enough fear and something that the killer could, hopefully, relate to. “I'm afraid that I'll never be the best at what I do, that one day I'll just fail monumentally at my job and get someone killed because of that.”

Which... wasn't a lie. It surprised even Malcolm how true those words were. He was good at what he did, there was no point in going for false modesty over that. But each time other people put their lives on the line based on nothing more than on one of his assumptions, Malcolm inwardly knew that there was a chance that he could be wrong and get someone killed. Which was why, most of the times, he'd rather take the risks himself.

The killer nodded in approval, apparently satisfied with the answer. “Now, that wasn't so hard, was it?”

Malcolm bit his tongue, knowing he would gain nothing by telling the killer to go fuck himself.

“Now that you've earned your right to choose,” the Professor went on, hoping from the crate and walking towards his captive audience. “Which one is it gonna be?” he asked in delight, like the choices were between chicken or pork.

Malcolm had been working for law enforcement for nearly a decade. Despite his... _propensity_ for disaster, he had managed to survive all of that time without ever being shot. He had been shot _at_ plenty of times, but he had never felt the bite of a bullet.

He had, however, been hit by a baseball bat. Once.

In the head.

By accident.

By himself, when he was eight and his parents decided that it was _cute_ to sign him up for Little League.

It had hurt like hell. He still carried the scar.

It wasn't all that hard to imagine how two of the victims had actually chosen the gun over the baseball bat. Each one of those men had stepped out of the airport with high hopes for a better life, for an rewarding adventure that would make it up for the fact that they had left all of their family and friends behind. Instead, they had seen themselves trapped inside a nightmare, with no hope for escape.

How could one blame them for choosing the quicker way out under those circumstances?

Malcolm also knew that the Professor was a manipulative bastard and a damn liar, because the two victims who _had_ shot themselves in the head had been just as beaten and battered as the remaining five. Which meant that the gun option didn't necessarily meant a quicker end. Just that their nightmare had started with a gunshot wound, probably someplace non-life threatening.

But even if he wasn't privy to that information, to Malcolm, there really was no choice. He _knew_ the team was already looking for him, knew that they had probably started looking only a couple of hours after he was taken. He had hope.

And he had to believe that it wouldn't take them long to find his location.

Any other day, Bright knew that his absence wouldn't be noticed until the following day, when he ultimately failed to show up at the precinct. Years of being a loner didn't go away over night and, while he usually made an extra effort to join in the team's social activities, it was still an effort.

But today was not any other day. Today was his _damn_ birthday.

His mother had called him first thing in the morning, practically blackmailing him into saying yes to the celebratory lunch she was organizing for him the following weekend. Ainsley had been kinder, and sent him a little gif on the phone of a geriatric man trying to cross the street with his walker. Because she found herself _hilarious_ \- even no one else did.

Malcolm knew for a fact that, after leaving the airport without getting any closer to finding the killer, everyone was planning to return to the precinct, for his 'surprise' birthday party. Which, given that they were still working the case, consisted mostly on a cake and a bottle from Gil's special stash.

Malcolm never had the heart to tell them just how hard it is to surprise a profiler. Especially when they kept growing quiet every time he entered a room for the past two days. Or when Edrisa forgot the receipt for the cake order on her desk.

The point was, Malcolm was _suppose_ to go home for the day and at some point, he imagined, someone would call him with some made up excuse to get him back to the precinct. When he didn't pick up, _hopefully_ , they would know that something was wrong.

Until the then, he had to do his best not to die on the same day he was born. “The bat,” he whispered, his chin dropping to his chest in defeat. “I pick the bat.”


	5. Chapter 5

-ºº-

“What do you mean he's not answering?” Gil asked, rhetorically as it was. Malcolm Bright never _not_ answered the phone when it was one of them. No matter where he was or what he was doing, he would always pick up. Always.

And it wasn't like he had gotten home and fallen asleep, failing to hear the phone ringing. The chances of that happening were about the same as dinosaurs start roaming the Earth again the next day.

The Lieutenant stared at the cake, white frosting with _blood_ splattered decorations in strawberry sauce. He was pretty sure that Malcolm was aware of their plans, because it was damn near impossible to get anything to slip past that kid, but Gil doubted that Malcolm would go as far as running away from them to avoid the impromptu party. A few years back? Probably. But not these days.

The whole party idea had been Edrisa's fault, as this things usually were. Gil wasn't going to say anything about the profiler's upcoming birthday, but the medical examiner had stumbled across the information when she had shamelessly _spied_ on Bright's medical chart after his stabbing and had decided to share the information with both Dani and JT. After that, it had been like trying to stop an avalanche.

The Lieutenant worried his bottom lip as his phone call reached Malcom's voice mail once more. It was probably nothing, but no good cop stayed alive for as long as he did without a healthy dose of paranoia. “JT, see if you can track down his phone,” he ordered. Malcolm was most probably home. They had seen him taking a cab, so he had to be home. Unless he had decided - _again-_ to pursue some lead on his own without calling for backup, in which case Gil needed to find him so he could properly throttle the kid's neck.

“Disconnected,” JT announced less than five minutes later. “Can't even get a lock on it. Last ping I can trace back is from five blocks away from JFK.”

The nagging feeling at the pit of Gil's stomach, the one that was quickly becoming an ulcer with Malcolm's name on it, reared its ugly head. There was only two ways for a phone to be disconnected, and since Bright never turned his off, someone must have done it for him. “Come on,” he called the other two detectives. “We're going for a ride.”

-ºº-

If there ever was a time when Gil wished he was wrong, this was it.

There was a loose tile on the last wooden step to Malcolm's place where he usually kept a spare key, a hiding place that, Gil suspected, way too many people knew about. The second they stepped inside the house, they knew that Malcolm was not home.

Not because all the lights were out, or even because of the way Sunshine was chirping urgently at them. No, it was the ' _Where the hell is my son?_ ” that greeted them as soon as they were through the door.

“We were hoping to find him here,” Gil pointed out, looking around the place. At first glance he couldn't see any signs of struggle or robbery. He couldn't see any signs of Malcolm being there either, after they had left him at the airport. The leather satchel that he had with him then was no where to be seen. “How long have you been here?”

Jessica sighed, finishing the drink in her glass. “Long enough to tell you that this isn't my first,” she confessed, mood swinging drastically from aggravated to concerned. “He wasn't answering any of my phone calls... what's happening, Gil? Where is he?”

Gil exchanged a concerned look with JT and Dani, both conspicuously silent since they had arrived. They all knew that something was seriously wrong. Even if something innocuous had happened to Malcolm's phone or if he simply wasn't in the mood to pick up, there was absolutely no reason why he shouldn't be home by now.

“That's what we're trying to find out,” Arroyo confessed. “Maybe he went out with some friends? A new girlfriend, perhaps?” Even as the words came out from his mouth, the Lieutenant knew how unlikely either of those scenarios was. Malcolm's list of friends could be counted on the fingers of one hand and the kid's love life hadn't exactly been the best since Eve. Or before that, for that matter.

Jessica's eyebrow rose slightly, the look on her face telling them that her opinion on those options was very much the same as theirs.

“Maybe he went to visit his father?” Dani suggested, sounding less than pleased with the thought.

Jessica grabbed the bottle to pour herself another drink. She tipped it in their direction, silently offering to share. “He isn't at Claremont,” she stated, bottle clinging against the kitchen's countertop when no one took her up on her offer. “I have... resources there,” she clarified under the detectives curious looks. “Ainsley can't reach him either.”

Gil took a deep breath, resisting the urge to pull at his hair. His ulcer was screaming under all the stress. “We need to trace that cab,” he pointed out to his detectives. “Find out which company it belongs to and where it dropped Malcolm off--”

“You think someone took my son again?” Jessica cut in, her face paling under the soft lights. “How can something like that happen? Are using him as _bait_ to catch murderers?”

“Jess--”

JT's phone chirped before Gil could appeased the distraught mother. The tall detective looked at the screen, quickly reading the text message. A smirk grew across his lips. “You know that theory that the killer might be using cameras on the his du-” he stopped himself, remembering that Malcolm's mother was still there before he could actually say 'dump site'. “They found the broadcasting signal, boss.”

Gil licked his lips, trying his best to not get his hopes too high up. _IF_ the killer had gotten his hands on Malcolm and _IF_ the signal could lead them to them... those were more ifs than what the Lieutenant was comfortable with. But he would take it for now. “Lead the way, then.”

-ºº-

Malcolm tried not to tense, but it was about as effective as diving into a pool and trying to stay dry. He knew that the killer would not hit him in the face, but every where else was fair game.

Which left a whole lot of painful possibilities.

The professor was taking his time. He had placed the gun out of reach, on top of the crate where he sat before starting his slow pacing around the bound man, the metal bat trailing behind him, dragging across the cement floor.

The tactic was pathetically transparent, but effective nonetheless. Every time the man disappeared from his line of sight, Malcolm would tense even harder, any illusion of preparing himself for the hit vanishing as he lost track of the bat.

Malcolm figured the Professor enjoyed this part almost as much as the actual violence. Making his victims squirm and flinch each time he came too close, breaking into a cold sweat out of pure fear. Beg for an act of mercy that the killer was uncapable of offering.

When the first strike came, it was so fast that the profiler felt the impact against his stomach before he felt anything else. And then the pain hit, like a tidal wave, at once sharp and all encompassing, abdominal muscles spasming in reaction as his whole body tried to fold in two even though he couldn't move an inch.

Before he could catch his breath, three more blows hit him in the chest in quick succession, the last one grazing his left nipple with such force that Malcolm was sure he blacked out for a few seconds.

He came to screaming.

The Professor stopped, breathing heavily. “Took you longer than the others,” he pointed out, licking his lips. “Now we can actually begin!”

Malcolm blinked away the beads of sweat from his eyes, his vision wavering under the pulsing agony that had seemed to have taken over his whole body. His mouth was desert-dry, tongue stinging from where he must have bitten it. “Wha-what?”

The man's lips twisted into a mockery of a smile, all teeth and scorn. “Come on, Mr. Profiler,” he hissed, closing the distance between them, making a grab for Malcolm's sweat soaked hair and yanking his head back. “You didn't really think I would actually fall for that whole ' _I fear failure'_ bullcrap, did you? Not from a celebrity like yourself!”

Bright felt like his heart was going to jump right off his chest. “I—I don't know what you're talking about,” he whispered, the words hurting as they squeezed through his throat. He couldn't do this! It was too soon, it would always be too soon and he couldn't handle this on top of everything else. Not this.

The other man leaned over, his face so close that Malcolm could count every single one of the blackened pores in the Professor's nose; could smell the coffee and cigarettes on his breath; could see the pinpricks of his pupils as the situation fueled his bloodlust. “Told you I know who you are,” the Professor hissed. “And I know what you're running from,” he whispered, closing his eyes as he not so subtly inhaled Malcolm's scent. “I can smell it on you, boy.”

Malcolm knew how much of a bad idea it was even as he pulled his head back, closed his eyes and head-butted the killer as hard as he could.

For a minute, there was nothing but stars in the profiler's field of vision and the heavy cursing coming from the other man.

As Malcolm's sight cleared somewhat, he could see the Professor holding onto his nose, blood sipping through his fingers. His eyes, however, where fixed on him, dangerously clouded with absolute rage. “You little fucker!”

Over two hundred pounds of violence stalked towards him, blind fury making the killer forget about all the twisted games that he enjoyed playing with his prey. Malcolm could see it in his eyes: the Professor was after blood.

The man's right hand reached inside his pocket, pulling out a small, black object. The switchblade extended with a flick of the wrist.

Malcolm's breath caught inside his chest. This was it. He was going to die. Right there and then, in his fucking underwear, tied to a chair in an abandoned warehouse. “No! Stop! You don-”

But the Professor wasn't even listening. Whatever rationality he had left had gone out the window the second Malcolm had given him a taste of his own violence. The killer snarled in satisfaction for a split second, teeth tained red from his dripping nose, before he lunged, sinking the knife into Malcolm's left thigh with all of his strength.

Bright howled as he felt the tip of the blade _scrape_ against bone, his scream ebbing into silence as unfathomable agony scorched his throat raw.

The world frizzled for a moment, vision filled with sparks and blotches of pure blackness. Malcolm couldn't move, couldn't breathe, couldn't even scream as his whole body locked down to protect him from the pain, muscles turned into stone, trapping him inside.

Blood trickled down, pooling on the floor and between his legs. Malcolm blinked away the wetness in his eyes, sweat and tears pooling down together to turn his vision into a watery wasteland. Despite the blinding pain, he couldn't afford to let his guard down.

Over the thundering sound of his heartbeat against his eardrums, the profiler could hear the killer's harsh breathing, see the revealing bulge in his sweat pants. The Professor was still there, standing right in front of him, staring down with a satisfied, flushed look on his face. Enjoying his work.

Malcolm gritted his teeth in anger, his thoughts clouded by the knowledge that he was giving the sadist prick exactly what he wanted. Angry at himself, for having lost track of his own objectives and stupidly egging the killer into hurting him further.

His eyes landed on the hilt of the switchblade, still sticking out from his upper thigh. From the amount of blood seeping around the edges, Malcolm figured that either the killer had managed to miss his femoral artery entirely or the blade was acting as a cork.

“You s-saving th-that for later?” Malcolm whispered with a nod towards the knife, carefully mouthing each word to hide his pain. “It's v-very un-unsanitary.”

The Professor smiled condescendingly, his hands laced behind his back, clearly back in control of himself. The image of sanity that he was trying to sell was shattered by the blood staining the lower half of his face, like some predator who'd just fed. “I'm wondering...” he let out, starting his pacing once again. “Do you think your friends found the right frequency yet?”

Malcolm's brain struggled to provide some sort of meaning to those words, but it was pointless, not when it was busy trying to figure out whether or not he was about to bleed to death in the next few minutes. “Wh-what frequency?”

The killer pointed towards the dark on Malcolm's left side.

At first, the profiler couldn't see anything except for the complete absence of light. He had spent hours searching every visible corner of that place, he intrinsically _knew_ that there wasn't anything there. Except... the killer had been watching him before, the same as he liked to watch his dump sites. Recording events so that he could later revisit them.

The second Malcolm realized what he was looking for, he saw it. The blinking red dot at a distance.

A camera.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Violence gets a bit more... violent in this chapter. Be ware of that!

It was well over two in the morning. It had been eighteen hours since JT had kissed his wife goodbye in their kitchen before leaving for work. Her lips had smelled of fresh coffee and warm butter, her hair like coconut.

It had been eight hours since they had seen Malcolm Bright get inside a cab outside JFK.

The Tarmels were, as a rule, not necessarily pessimists, but ultimately pragmatic people. His momma had raised five boys practically single handedly, with their father being deployed most of the time. Growing up, not once had she given JT and his brothers false hopes about the harsh reality of being a soldier's kid, about what it meant to be a soldier's wife. It made them appreciate their father more when he was around and respect their mother even more when he was away.

Their family had been lucky when it came to his father, still alive and well, living his retirement happily now by his wife's side. That kind of luck hadn't held up when it came to JT's kid brother. Like their father, his father before him, and the detective himself, AJ Tarmel had followed the Tarmel tradition of serving their country. He had died in Afghanistan, two years after JT had left the service.

Bright reminded him of AJ, with his stupid big eyes and juvenile sense of wonderment at his job. It was just his damn luck that the kid would get himself killed know that JT was starting to like him.

“Do we know who owns the place?”

Gil was in full protective gear, ready to move in with the rest of the strike team. As the commanding officer, he _should_ have stayed behind, in the security of the command center van parked at the corner, but no one had succeeded in convincing the Lieutenant of the logic in that.

Sometimes, JT wondered if Gil and Bright weren't actually related for real.

“A construction company named Timothy & Son,” Dani answered, looking at the abandoned building. From outside, it looked like no one had set food inside for over a decade. “They went bankrupt in 08, the place was never bought after that.”

“And we're certain the signal is coming from inside?”

JT nodded. “Technical managed to pinpoint it to the East corner of the building, ground floor,” he explained. “And it's still active.”

“Okay,” Gil let out at the end of a deep breath. He raised a finger to touch the comm in his right ear. “Everyone, listen up; we're doing this one by the book, so everyone stay sharp. Our suspect is to be considered armed, extremely dangerous and possibly holding one of our own as a hostage. Now, move out!”

SWAT members headed out with well practiced moves, scattering around all of the building's entry points, making sure that the place was completely surrounded before moving in. Taking a one last look at the thermal scanner in his hands, the man on point signaled the others with two quick jabs of his hand.

Fifteen men and women poured inside the building from all sides, a black tidal wave that swirled through the space in complete silence, leaving no corner unchecked until they reached the East corner.

Following in the wake of the strike team, Gil, JT and Dani moved straight for the only source of light on the abandoned ground floor. A single square of light, surrounded by walls made of wooden crates.

Gil looked around, making sure that everyone was in position and ready to charge in at the same time. “NYPD! Come out with your hands over your head!”

After a beat where no one moved or dared to breathe, they moved in, six assault riffles circling the crates and zeroing in on a man strapped to a chair.

JT cursed, voicing a sense of disappointment that was shared by the whole team. The man strapped to the chair, with his short cropped white hair, was most obviously not Bright. He pulled out a glove, placing two fingers on the unconscious man throat. A faint thread pulsed underneath his touch, giving him the only good news of the day so far. “He's alive! Let's get an ambulance in here!”

Judging from the uniform that the victim wore, it was clear that the man was a security guard. The mess of congealed blood and red tainted hair at the back of his head spoke of being caught unaware, most likely a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“JT, come have a look at this,” Gil called out to him. While the rest of the SWAT team had split up to ran a swipe of the building's upper floors, the Lieutenant and Powell had turned their attention to all the electronic devices scattered on the floor around the victim. “This has to be the source of the signal.”

The tall detective nodded. He was no tech wiz, but at first glance he could recognize a couple of heavy duty routers, some home made motherboards, stripped down CPUs and miles of wiring. There was a laptop opened on top of a crate, its screen black.

“Do you think that he's coming back here?” JT asked no one in particular. The whole setup felt fake, arranged somehow. There was no evidence of human presence other than the victim, and even the security guard's presence seemed more coincidental than anything else. It felt staged in a way that was giving him the creeps.

“I doubt that,” Gil pointed out. He too seemed to be taking in the crime scene, looking for the missing piece that would bring some sort of sense to the whole thing. “He wanted us to find this place, but instead of leaving us another of his victims for us to _admire_ , he left the security guard alive instead... why? What did he wanted us to see?”

“Th-this.”

Dani's voice broke. Dani never allowed her emotions to control her to the point that it affected her actions, much less her voice. It was alarming enough to hear it, even more so to realize that all color had drained from her face as she looked at the laptop's screen. “I... I didn't touch anything... it just came on by itself.”

JT rushed to her side, his gut screaming a useless warning that he was not going to like what he was about to see. There was no turning back for any of them now. “Boss... maybe yo--”

It was pointless. The Lieutenant was right by his side, eyes turning to steel as soon as he caught a glimpse of the image on screen.

Malcolm Bright, sitting in the middle of a room very similar to the one where they stood, strapped to a chair in a way that hurt just from looking. Other than the spooked look on his face and his lack of clothing, he looked unarmed.

“Someone get a trace on this right away!” Gil let out before his attention was reeled back to the computer. “We need to figure out if this is a live feed or a recording.”

It was impossible to tell. All they could see on screen was what the killer wanted them to see. There were no clocks, no windows, no way of knowing if Malcolm remained as alone and unscathed as he looked on screen.

  
  


“ _Has anyone ever tell you that you talk in your sleep?”_

The unfamiliar voice startled them, coming crystal clear through the computer.

In his chair, Malcolm froze, his gaze moving widely as he conspicuously looked for something that none of them could see.  _“I do a lot more than talking when I sleep.”_ From the expression on the profiler's face, they could tell that he was talking to the killer. The Bone Crusher.

“He's in there with him,” Dani let out, bitting into her lower lip. She looked around, noticing the number of officers crowded in the small space, going through every fiber and piece of technology laying around. “He knows we're here,” she whispered to the others.

JT nodded. It made sense. The timing for the computer to come online just as the killer made his appearance was too perfect to be a coincidence. That sick bastard had been waiting for their arrival to make his move on Bright and they had played right into his game. “That sick motherfu-”

On screen, the killer finally moved into their line of sight, even if all that they could see was his back. What was very clear, were the weapons in his hands. A gun and a baseball bat.

“Oh, God!”

They couldn't stop watching as Malcolm and the killer talked, each of them carefully weighting his words, trying to get the upper hand.

JT tensed as the profiler tried to lure the killer into a false sense of security, claiming that he had no idea what was going on or who the man was. It was clear from the whole apparatus surrounding them that the killer had planned all of this even before grabbing Malcolm. He knew exactly who the profiler was and he was not going to be amused with being treated like an idiot.

The three of them stood glued to the screen, too afraid to blink or take a breath, certain that they were witnessing the beginning of a nightmare that would eventually end with the death of the profiler.

On the screen, the killer moved lightning fast, brandishing a baseball bat at Malcolm's leg. The team flinched as the weapon came down with a vengeance on the trapped man.

The sound of the bat hitting its mark had echoed inside the computer, metal against concrete. It grated against their ears, but at least it wasn't the muffled sound it would have made had it struck flesh. The lack of any pain in Malcolm's expression confirmed it.

“ _Don't play games with me, boy!”_

Their relief lasted for less than a second as Malcolm gasped on screen, the end of the bat pressed against the profiler's throat.

Dani was biting her nails, a habit she had succeeded to drop a while ago. It was back now. They could painfully see how desperately Malcolm was gasping for air, powerless to move away, helplessly depended on the killer to take his next breath.

When the killer finally pulled away, they all felt light headed, their own lungs screaming for oxygen.

“That... that sick fuck is just toying with him!”

“No, he's toying with us,” Gil let out with a pained sigh. His eyes were suspiciously wet as he walked to the laptop and pressed the screen down. It felt like he was closing the lid of a coffin as the screen hit the keypad, closing the laptop. “We can't play his game... we owe that much to Bright.”

Tarmel looked at the older man in the eye, placing his hand over Gil's. “Someone needs to watch it, boss,” he pointed out painfully. They needed to identify the killer, and this was their best source of information. “It just ain't gonna be you.”

~º~

In the brief instants when he realized that everything had been filmed since the second he had been placed on that chair, Malcolm went through every single moment, analyzing every action and word that had happened. Of course, there was a small chance that the killer was bluffing, that the camera was just recording and no feed was being broadcast, but that didn't fit the profile.

The Professor wanted to show off his work. And now, displaying the bodies just wasn't enough anymore; he needed people to watch _as_ he worked. To see the master perform his craft. It was just Malcolm's shitty luck that serial killers seemed to have a thing for evolving right in front of his eyes. Fascinating as it was, he'd rather it stopped happening altogether.

Despite knowing that he was not the one at fault, the profiler could feel his cheeks growing hot and bright red with embarrassment. He had no idea where the Professor was broadcasting that feed, but at the moment all he could imagine was everyone on the precinct watching what was happening to him. Judging his failures in bright HD color.

More than embarrassed, Malcolm felt violated. His fragility and pain exposed to complete strangers, people whom he worked with but had no emotional connection with. People who had been waiting for something like this to happen, to prove their point that Bright didn't belong there, that he wasn't good enough for the NYPD.

But what was worse, Gil, Dani and JT would see it too.

The one good thing that had come out of the whole John Watkins _situation_ was the fact that no one but the two of them knew what had happened inside that cell and John had been too far gone inside his head when he was arrested to say anything at all.

No one knew about their conversations. No one had _seen_ him get stabbed. No one knew about Malcolm's hallucinations. No one had witnessed how hard he had cried when John left him alone. All that was on the official report was what Malcolm had decided to share with them. Everything else he had kept to himself, only to be revisited in his nightmares.

He wasn't going to be as lucky this time around and, for a second, Malcolm wished that the Professor would just kill him already, rather than face the humiliation later.

“You still have a question to answer,” the Professor reminded him impatiently, talking as if he hadn't just completely changed the game.

“Fuck you!” Malcolm spat, allowing anger and frustration to take a front seat. He tried to shift in his seat, causing the knife to wobble ever so slightly inside him. He couldn't stop the moan that slipped through his lips as pain exploded from his leg. “Fuck!”

The Professor laughed, a mocking sound that grated against the profiler's ears more than the knife against his bone. “No point in playing the though guy now,” he warned, coming closer, ignoring the tears of pure agony that escaped his prisoner's eyes. He ran a hand across Malcolm's sweat soaked hair, making a show of arranging the disarrayed locks into some semblance of order. “They've already seen you screaming for me,” he went on, his voice lowering into a whisper as he leaned closer to Malcolm's ear. “And if you don't answer my fucking question, they can watch as I cut off your balls and feed them to you. One. At. A. Time.”

Bright resisted the urge to head-butt the man one more time, but he couldn't really risk having another knife stuck inside of him. There was also no doubt on his mind that the killer meant every word that he had just said.

Reluctantly, Malcolm gave him a tense nod.

“Good!” the man all but clapped his hands in joy, acting like Malcolm actually had a choice in the matter. “So, let's hear it... what is your biggest fear?”

Bright closed his eyes. His leg was screaming in pain, the knife sticking from his thigh seemingly pulsing with every beat of his heart. He felt so tired, so utterly drained physically and mentally that giving up was beginning to sound like a reasonable idea. “I fear--” he started, looking up straight at the camera, knowing that Gil, Dani and JT would be watching, that they would never look at him the same after this. However, coming up with another lie at this point would mean the end for him and Malcolm could not do that. Not with Gil watching. “I'm afraid of becoming my father.”

The Professor smiled, patting him on the shoulder in a gesture that had probably been planned as reassuring, but felt nothing but condescending, like he was petting a dog. “That's it, very good! Now, tells us why.”

Malcolm bristled. “You said one question,” he reminded the killer.

“And you lied to me!” the Professor hissed, his temper too quick to boil over the reminder. “Consider us... even,” he added with a snarl.

Malcolm weighted his options. On one hand, he knew that if he kept playing the killer's game he could probably gain more time for the team to find him, but he knew that if he answered this question, the following would be even worse, more personal, more invasive, until his whole life had been exposed and laid raw for all to see. On the other hand, refusing could either send the killer into a blinding rage that would end up with him dead or push him to fulfill his most recent threat.

There was, however, a third hand to consider. “No.”

The Professor's pacing came to an abrupt stop. “What did you say?”

Malcolm took a deep breath, pulling all of his strength and resolve into that single word. “I said NO.”

The Professor tilted his head, as if trying to weight the seriousness of his decision. “No,” he parrot, as if the word was alien to him. “He says no,” he repeated, talking to no one at all, his voice laced with resentment and hatred.

Malcolm could feel himself shaking, a wave of uncontrollable terror that started in his hands and took over his entire body. As he saw the killer pick up the bat and walk towards him, the profiler knew that there was no turning back now. He closed his eyes.

The first hit struck the profiler in his right leg, hard enough to send him and the chair flying had it not been bolted to the floor. The second time the Professor swung the bat, he aimed at his left shoulder.

Malcolm screamed as he felt bone breaking under the blow, his whole arm instantly growing numb even as it burned in pain.

The bat came down again, crashing against his left tight and the knife lodged there. Pure agony shot up from his leg, drowning everything else. There was no sound, no sight, no breath left to scream. Bile rose to his mouth and Malcolm gagged, unable to process everything his body was screaming at him, unable to spit out the surge of acid in his throat. The world shimmered around the edges before blissfully blinking out of existence.

Bright had never been more grateful for a moment of darkness in his life.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some tags have been now added to the story due to things that happen in this chapter. Please read them. Nothing explicit will happen, but if the implication of certain sexual actions makes you feel uncomfortable, feel free to skip this chapter.

~º~

Dani walked back into the abandoned building with a growing sense of dread. JT had volunteered to keep an eye on the video feed, hoping to catch some hint of who this guy was, some clue in the midst of the conversations between Malcolm and the crazy son of a bitch holding him prisoner. No one else was supposed to be there, no one else had authorization to watch what was happening in that video feed.

Gil had agreed to walk away, somewhat reluctantly, leaving only JT and Dani behind inside the building. Even though he offered special treatment to no one, they all knew how the Lieutenant felt about Bright. Their commanding officer was the biggest mother-hen to everyone in the 16th precinct, but he was a father figure to only one. To make him stand and watch on screen as Malcolm was tortured, being helpless to do anything to put an end to it? That was torture in itself, and not one of them would allow their Lieutenant to submit himself to that.

JT had volunteered, but that didn't mean that he had to do it alone. Dani knew about the brother he had lost, she had figured that most of the man's bellyaching towards Bright came from the profiler reminding him of his baby brother. She _knew_ this wasn't easy for him either.

“Gil's gone?” he asked, watching her walk closer. He looked ashen under the florescent lights.

Dani nodded, her eyes quickly moving to what was happening on the computer screen. Malcolm was covered in sweat, his head hanging limp against his chin, his jaw slack and his shoulders slumping. “Is he...” she could bring herself to finish. No, he wasn't dead. JT wouldn't just be strangling that ballpoint pen he was using to take notes if Bright was dead; he would have stabbed the wooden crate with it by now.

“Passed out,” he pushed through gritted teeth. “Bastard made him chose between a bat and a gun,” he went on, his eyes glued to the screen. The light reflected off the brown, making it shimmer and look suspiciously wet. “Then he proceeded to beat the crap out of him until he passed out.”

Dani closed her eyes. Behind her lids, she could still see Malcolm's body, only now he was on Edrisa's table, looking much like all the other Bone Crusher's victims that they had found. Her eyes snapped back open as the killer started speaking, goading Bright with his knowledge of who he was and what he did for the team. “Did you managed to get a good glimpse of his face?”

Tarmel shook his head. “Nothing. Only thing useful so far is that the prick calls himself 'The Professor',” he let out, disdain punctuating every word. “I think he fancies himself as some enlightened bastard, teaching his victims something about themselv—oh, shit!”

Dani crouched down next to her partner, taking a better look at what was happening. She quickly realized what had caused JT's reaction.

The Professor was getting way too close and personal with the profiler. His fingers were on Malcolm's hair, combing through the locks in a possessive way before yanking his head back to whisper something into his ear.

Although they couldn't hear what was being said, both detectives could clearly see in his expressive eyes the moment Bright's bad decision was formed. “Don't do it, bro...” JT begged, even though it was pointless to talk to the computer.

Even if he had heard the warning, Malcolm would have probably ignored it just the same. He pulled his head back and bashed it against the killer's face. The smack of bone against bone was muffled by distance, but still sharp enough.

Dani cringed.

“Damn it, Bright!”

“No, no, no,” Dani said over and over, not quite believing her eyes. First rule of a hostage situation was not to antagonize your kidnapper! What was Bright hoping to achieve breaking the guy's nose? He was still tied to that damn chair, there was nothing to gain in attacking the killer...

And then it hit her. The killer had said something into Malcolm's ear, something that had made him lose his composure.

The very first case they had worked together was still as fresh in her mind as if it had happened last week. The way Bright had fallen to his knees in front of the killer, pouring his heart out, completely surrendering to whatever Berkhead wanted to do to him, offering his life so callously...

In that very moment, Powell had realized something about the profiler that most people who worked with him didn't even bothered to see; Malcolm wore his emotions on skin surface, hidden behind his expensive suits and profiling parlor tricks. All anyone needed to do was look a little bit closer, ask the right question, and they would _know_.

The illusion crumbled all too easily, belying the effort it probably took to put it up in the first place. Underneath, Malcolm was just like everyone else. Insecure, fragile and prone to have his buttons pushed the wrong way.

Like now. When he had just lost it over something the killer had said.

On the screen, they finally caught a glimpse of the Professor's face, as he jumped back howling, both hands wrapped around his bleeding nose. At first glance, he looked like any other Joe, a complete stranger.

They both knew this would not end well for their profiler, but it was impossible to not feel a degree of pride over the man's bold action. It was somewhat satisfying to see the other side bleed as well.

The feeling quickly evaporated as the killer flipped a switch-blade open and stabbed Malcolm in the leg. No warning, no hesitation. Just violence.

The sound that ripped itself from Bright's throat was something that neither of them wanted to hear ever again. Dani fought the urge to cover her ears and run away, the fine hair at the back of her neck standing to attention as acid churned inside her stomach. “Oh, God...”

Sitting frozen in front of the screen, JT was stone silent. The sound of the pen snapping between his fingers echoed through the empty space, chasing Malcolm's ragged breathing on screen. Blue ink spilled all over his hand, but JT didn't even noticed.

“ _I'm wondering... Do you think your friends found the right frequency yet?”_

Malcolm's pale face on the screen lost all traces of color at those words. In that white canvas, his eyes seemed impossibly blue as he stared directly at the camera, noticing it for the first time. 

Dani looked away, ashamed. Even though she knew he couldn't see her, couldn't possibly guess that she was watching this, it still felt wrong,  _invasive_ . And yet, she could not step away and leave JT to face this alone.

Damned if she stayed, damned if she didn't. Which only made her want to put a pair of cuffs on that murderous bastard all the harder.

“He didn't even knew,” JT whispered, absently wiping his hand on his shirt. He sounded disappointed. Frustrated.

Because, if Malcolm had no idea that they were watching, he couldn't have possibly slip in a clue to them. And all he had been doing so far was watch as their team mate was tortured.

Dani's phone buzzed inside her pocket and she picked it up with shaking fingers. “Gil's got a lead on the cab company,” she shared. Deep down, it was a relief that the Lieutenant had sent a text rather than call her for an update. She didn't think she could actually form the words to tell her boss what had just happened to Malcolm. “He'll let us know as soon as he has something.”

On the screen, Bright was talking. It was all too easy to hear the pain in his voice, catch the labour of his calculated breathes. His eyes flickered shyly to the camera again. It hurt to see how embarrassed Malcolm was with the presence of that intrusive element.

“ _You still have a question to answer.”_

“ _Fuck you!”_

Dani worried at her bottom lip. Her eyes kept glancing between the blade stuck inside Bright's leg and the pulsing vein above JT's left eye. She could feel the tension building up, on the screen and beside her. Something was going to give.

“Maybe Gil was right... we should just close the feed,” she suggested. In a way, it felt like she was telling JT to abandon Malcolm, but standing there, watching, when there was nothing that they could do... it was becoming more than either of them could bear.

They could see the killer moving closer to Malcolm, once again leaning over to whisper something in his ear. This time around, the profiler refrained from head butting him, but they could see the moment his face paled even further, making him almost glow like a ghost in the dim light. He nodded, the movement slow and defeated.

“ _Good! So, let's hear it... what is your biggest fear?”_

Dani shared a look with Tarmel. They had worked with Malcolm long enough to know the answer to that one. Still, it hurt to see the words being forced from the profiler's mouth.

“ _I'm afraid of becoming my father.”_

The fact that the killer dared to touch Malcolm's shoulder after pushing him to admit something like that only added insult to injury. Dani was not a violent person, but this whole situation was making her want to beat the crap out of that guy.

Her own thirst for violence, however, took a back seat as she saw the expression that took over the profiler's face. That look on Malcolm's eyes was one they were both very familiar with and it was one that scared the hell out of them. They had seen it before, when the profiler had been kneeling on the floor of a victim's office, holding down between his hands an unstable land mine about to blow. When he had reassured everyone that he had a plan, only to be blown out of a third story window on top of Gil's car.

They had started calling that Malcolm's 'crazy suicidal plan' look. And it was all over his eyes right then.

It was the only warning JT and Dani had before all hell broke loose on screen.

Malcolm stood as straight as he could in his chair and refused to answer anymore questions from the killer. The _Professor_ was not happy with that.

There was no warning this time around, no negotiation. The Professor just picked up the bat and started hitting the bound man.

It was clear to see that Malcolm was trying to control his vocal reactions to the beating for their sake, for the sake of the filming camera, as nothing but a mere whimper escaped his lips after the first impact. However, there was nothing he could do to stop the scream that exploded from inside as the sound of breaking bone filled the computer's speakers.

Dani's hand flew to her mouth, unsure if she was trying to stop her own scream from coming out or the bile threatening to burst from her mouth.

As the weapon hit his already injured leg, Malcolm's scream turned voiceless, breathless, until he simply slumped on the chair, finally losing his senses.

“I'm going to kill that son of a bitch!” JT exploded, hands turned to tight fists, looking for something to break.

There were tears running down the sides of Dani's eyes, but she couldn't make herself look away. It was like driving by a particularly gory accident, disturbing to see but impossible to ignore.

She found herself transfixed by the static image of Bright's body, bloody and bruise, limply slumped backwards, his head tilted back, slack, leaving his long neck exposed and unprotected. She wanted to protect him so badly that it felt like a physical ache inside of her chest.

“Oh, shit! No... that fucker ain't--” JT was fuming by her side.

Dani wiped her eyes with a furious swipe, focusing back on the screen. Malcolm was out, but the killer was still there. They couldn't see more than his silhouette in front of the unconscious profiler, but from the way his right arm was positioned and frantically moving, the sounds he was making... it was pretty clear what he was doing.

Even though she had not found clear evidence of sexual assault, Edrisa had mentioned the traces of semen on the other victims, a tidbit of information that all of them had chosen to ignore now that Malcolm was in the killer's hands. The medical examiner had never figured out how the semen had gotten there, but that part was now clear to them. Apparently, the Professor waited until his victims were dead to the world and fucking _masturbated_ to the sight. Like the sick fuck that he was.

It was too much.

“Oh, God...”

“I swear... I'll fucking kill him!” JT roared, rising to his feet and kicking the nearest crate. The wooden box disintegrated into tiny pieces under the force of his anger. “If he dares to touch just one hair--”

It was an empty threat, and they both knew it. They had no idea where Malcolm was, and even if they did know where he was and left right there and then, it was impossible for them to would reach the profiler in time to save him from anything, if the Professor chose to take things further. The only thing that they could do was close the computer screen and leave Malcolm alone to his fate.

Dani looked around, urgently searching for some trash can, an empty evidence bag, anything... she ended up running away from the boarded crime scene and throwing up on the floor. Even though the image was gone, she could still hear it, the sound too loud, grating against her ears. She forced herself to walk back. Do her job.

“He's gone,” Dani let out in a hoarse whisper. “He just... finished and left.”

JT rushed back to the computer, doing his best to find his composure somewhere along the short walk. “Did he--?”

Dani shook her head, curls clinging to her wet cheeks. “No. Didn't even touch him,” she let out, relief in her voice. It was bad enough that the killer had jacked off to the sight of their unconscious friend, but at least he hadn't tried to _interact_. “I don't think he likes to actually touch them. Remember what Bright said in his profile?”

“White guy, late forties, physically imposing,” JT listed from memory. It felt like so long ago that they had stood in the morgue, going over the first victim, when in fact only two days had gone by. “Something about struggling with the fact that he was gay?”

Powell nodded. “Yeah... I mean, look at him,” she said, pointing at the NYPD computer where they were storing the video feed. The image on screen was frozen, showing their only clear shot of the killer's face. Even with his hands covering half his features, holding his bleeding nose, they could still catch the color of his skin, the traces of white hair in his head, the breadth of his shoulders. “Malcolm was right about everything else, he was probably right about that too. This guy believes that he can simply choose not to like men.”

“Because he only gets his freak on when they're out,” JT ventured, seeing where Dani's train of thought was heading.

“I think he goes a step further,” she whispered, looking disgusted at her own theory.

Tarmel closed his eyes, shaking his head. “Please don't say it,” he begged.

Dani grimaced apologetically. “I think he only has sex with his victims when they're not men at all,” she let out. “When they're dead.” 

The tall detective growled, bitting on his lower lip as he looked at her disapprovingly. “You _had_ to say it, didn't you?”

“We need to get him out of there, JT,” Dani voiced. She was bitting on her nail again. Her eyes had found their way to Malcolm's unconscious figure once again. He hadn't even stirred throughout the killer's display. “Gil won't survive losing his kid... not like this.”

Tarmel ran a hand over his short hair. “Tech Unit is still running a trace on the feed. Seems like he covered his tracks pretty damn well this time around,” he admitted, frustrated. There was no point in admitting that they had only found the first trace because the killer wanted them to. “I'm sick of playing by this guy's rules!”

Dani was about to agree when something on the video feed caught her attention. “JT... can we zoom in on the knife?”

The detective gave her a side look, probably finding the request strange and grotesque. It was hard enough looking at that thing sticking out from Malcolm's leg from afar. He did not want to have a closer look. Still, he turned to the police computer and did it anyway.

As soon as the image was large enough for them to see the handle, JT realized what she was looking for. “Son of a _bitch_!”

That last hit from the killer's bat had slightly changed the angle of the knife, turning the handle a bit more towards the camera. Enough for them to see the engraving on the leather.

Samuel L. Simmons.

They finally had a lead.

~º~

Malcolm came to gagging on his own spit. For a moment, he was at lost on where he was and why he could barely move his head. He opened his eyes, finding himself looking at a naked ceiling, a cobweb of light and air conditioner conducts. Reality rushed forward all too quickly to present itself in all of its nightmarish colors after that.

Taken by a killer? Check.

Strapped to a chair? Check.

Leg on fire? Hell, check.

Arm broken? Check and check.

Stupid, suicidal plan to goad the killer into beating him senseless so that he could gain some time? Triple check.

Bright struggled to raise his head, his neck stiff from the awkward position. As far as he could see, he was alone for now, only the red light from the camera keeping him company. The killer was probably watching him even now, listening in, but Malcolm couldn't find the will to care anymore.

The wound on his leg was still bleeding sluggishly and, although awake, Malcolm still felt like his head was floating ten feet above him.

“Guys...” he rasped out, talking directly towards the camera. His voice wasn't working right, sound struggling to come out straight and steady through his abused throat. “I really hope you're minutes away from kicking that door open,” he confessed tiredly, “because I think I'm running out of time here.”

He blinked hard, trying to force his eyes to work properly. Everything around him kept going in and out of focus and the wavering was steadily making him dizzier and nauseous.

“I.. I wish I could help you guys, but I don't have that much information for you,” he went on, closing his eyes against the continuous waves of vertigo. “He drives a cab, but I'm guessing you already figured that out by now... calls himself the Professor, but I don't think he ever was one... possibly psychology, drop out student because he couldn't afford it... his b-baseball bat has a bird in it, red... I don't think it's from one of the New York teams, but sports aren't really my strong s-suite.”

Malcolm took a deep breath, coughing when it caught on his bruised chest. Maybe he should have added a cracked rib to his list of grievances...

His eyes landed on the floor in front of him. He cringed as he saw several stains of different shades covering the concrete. Some were dark brown, evidence of the Professor's nosebleed, others were... something else.

Malcolm recoiled in disgust, noticing the blob of dry white substance resting on top of his right knee.

His mind kept trying to come up with an alternative, reasonable, explanation for what that could be, what could have happened while he had been unconscious, but Malcolm was drawing a blank. He frantically looked at his body, trying to find further evidence of what might have happened, taking some solace in the fact that he couldn't see or feel anything else out of place. Still...

Bright gagged, telling himself that it was nothing, that he was fine... but he was fooling no one, not even himself. “The susp-suspect appears to be a somnophiliac,” Malcolm rasped out, taking solace in the technical terms instead, losing himself in the psychology of the killer's mind. It was safer than his own at the moment. “He seems to take pleas—pleasure in unc-unconscious subjects... extreme somnophiliacs may progressed to necrophilia at some point, unsatisfied with mere loss of senses and requiring complete...” he paused, taking a shaky breath. “Complete absence of life.”

Malcolm's voice faltered. God... he couldn't do this. The idea that the camera had been recording everything as the killer... “Please... don't let my family see this,” he whispered, biting his lower lip to stop the tears from flowing. “My mo-mom can't know any of the details... just tell her tha-” a sob broke free, despite his best efforts to keep his emotions hidden. Those too, were now on display, just like everything else. “Just tell her that I love her. Ainsley too...” Malcolm took a shaky breath, looking up, away from the camera, searching for strength and composure somewhere in the empty ceiling. Tears ran down the sides of his face, fading away into his hair. It took him a few moments to find the will to look back at the camera. “Gil,” he said then, licking his cracked lips. “Gil, this is not your fault, none of it is and I-” he bit down, breaking skin on his bottom lip, “I'm sorry...I'm so sorry...”

“Who is Gil?”

Malcolm's breath caught in his chest, struggling to control his emotions, trying to find some semblance of serenity to face the killer head on. A hurtful sneer spread across his lips, belied only by the revealing wetness on his cheeks. “Jealous?”

The Professor's face contorted in anger before reigning in his own emotions. It was disgustingly easy to see how quickly he had mistaken the paternal love Bright felt for Gil for something else entirely.

“Being jealous would imply having feelings for you, Malcolm,” the Professor hissed, closing the distance between them. “And the only feeling I have for you right now is disappointment. Besides, you're not my type.”

Malcolm swallow against a dry throat, struggling to remain focused. It was getting harder to think straight, but still it was easy to spot the defensive tone on the other man's voice. “Is that what you call that?” he asked, looking at the offensive glop on his knee. “ _Disappointment_?”

Bright knew he should stop aggravating the man holding his life in his hands, but he was too tired to care. His right arm felt cold as ice, his left leg was on fire and he could die for a sip of water. Plus, the guy had already used him as a sex doll, why not make him face his actions and deal with it?

The Professor's face twisted into something not quite human as he stepped forward, within reach of his prisoner. For a moment, as the killer leaned forward, Malcolm imagined that he was going to wipe away the evidence of his actions from his knee. Instead, he reached for the wrong leg, yanking the knife free.

Malcolm grunted, bouncing against the metal chair, his vision blacking out for a few seconds. He breathed through his nose, trying to fight through the pain. But it was a hopeless battle. He cried out long and hard, struggling against the ropes bidding his arms, helpless to reach the source of his pain.

Suddenly, the pressure holding his hands back was gone, limbs moving disjointedly forward, heavy and numb, completely alien to him. It took Malcolm a few agonizing moments to realize that the Professor had just cut his hands free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My gratitude to Jameena and ProcastinatingSab for their wise words and advice regarding this chapter. Thank you girls!


	8. Chapter 8

He couldn't move his right arm. It lay floppy and ice cold by his side, like it was made of rubber or belonged to someone else entirely. The feeling should have freaked him out, but between the killer standing so close and the bleeding wound on his leg, Malcolm couldn't find the necessary energy to panic.

“Do you want some water?” the Professor offered. The blood covered knife that he had used to cut Malcolm's ropes was still in his hand, dripping on the floor.

“Wha-what?”

“You look about ready to pass out again,” the man pointed out, head tilted sideways, studying him closely. “Water helps... don't go anywhere, I'll be right back.”

Malcolm couldn't contain the nervous laugh that bursted out from his lips. _Water helps_... what would really _help_ was something to stop the bleeding in his leg. What would _help_ was for this nightmare to end, even if it meant waking up in his own bed, screaming his lungs out. What would definitely _help_ was getting some clothes to cover himself up and warm up. He was so damn cold...

He watched as the killer turned his back on him and walked away, carrying the knife with him. Bright looked down, confused, his heart beating widely inside his chest.

The math was pretty clear. His arms and legs were free from the chair and the killer was gone. Either he was hallucinating the whole thing, or it was a trap. Either way, it was a chance that he could not waste, since it was most likely his last.

Bright put his best effort into getting up from the metal chair. His right leg was shaking uncontrollably as soon as he tried to put some weight on it, and his left leg refused to move at all. He closed his eyes in frustration, sitting back down after having conquered only a few inches on gravity. He shivering under the cold sweat that had broken all over his skin, making him feel like he had just climbed a damn mountain. “Damn it!”

He tried one more time, using his left arm to push himself up. This time around, Malcolm managed to actually stand up. However, his victory was short lived as blood rushed all too quickly out of his head, making the world spin around him, dark edges closing in. He fell backwards, landing on the chair by pure chance, screaming as the fall jolted the wound on his leg.

_I am capable of whatever I set my mind to do._ That had been his last daily affirmation card. A chuckle erupted from deep inside Malcolm's chest, a sound that had very little to do with joy. He was capable of doing whatever he set his mind to do _except_ getting up from a fucking chair.

Martin's voice echoed from the edge of darkness, as he leaned casually against a tall pile of crates.

“My dear boy... sure seems like you're in a pickle now.”

~ºº~

Gil stared at the report in his hands. He had been reading the same line for over half an hour now, but for the life of him, he could not tell what it said.

This was Jackie all over again. Waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for test results, waiting at the doctor's office for a glimpse of good news. Hands tied with nothing else to do but wait.

He couldn't do it again. He had barely managed to survive the first time around.

Timothy and Son, the company who had owned the abandoned building, had been a dead end. The whole Timothy family had either died or moved to Florida, leaving behind no distant relatives or close associates.

The security guard they had found there had been no help at all. The man had been caught unaware, clubbed from behind before he could see anyone, only to wake up at the hospital, surrounded by cops who needed answers that he couldn't give.

The cab company had turned out to be another dead end. Gil had put every available eye at the precinct looking through all of the traffic cameras footage around the airport. They had quickly gotten the license plate of the guy who had picked up Malcolm, only to find out that the driver assigned to that cab was a ghost. More specifically, the ghost of a man who had died three years ago. And without a picture of the man, it was impossible to learn anything from the other cab drivers who worked the area.

Clearly the killer had used a fake ID to drive the cab, which meant that they had absolutely nothing to go on. No leads, no suspects, no idea where Malcolm was.

The only thing that they knew for certain was what the killer would do to the profiler and how they would ultimately find his dead body.

The report shook on Gil's hands. He tossed it away in anger. He couldn't even remember what it had been about.

He shoved his hands inside his pocket, hiding the tremor from his own view, as if that made it go away. His fingers brushed against the soft fur of his rabbit foot keychain, the one Jackie had give him as a joke. Had he been a superstitious man, Gil would swear that the damn thing was broken, because it brought him nothing but bad luck. Still, it gave him an odd sense of comfort as he absently rubbed his fingers on it.

If he closed his eyes, he could almost see his wife's devious smile as she had picked it up from the store stand. _For luck_ , she had said, _because driving the way you do, we'll need all the help we can get._

They needed to find some thread to chase, just one...

The phone buzzed against his desk, pulling the Lieutenant away from his memories. Even before he picked it up, Gil knew it was Powell.

“Give me some good news,” he pleaded, even though he knew how unfair that was. He had left his two best detectives watching that damn video feed, knowing the horrible things that they would be forced to watch, and yet here he was, demanding that _they_ of all people offered some soothing balm for his aching soul. It made him feel like a damn coward.

“We got a name, boss,” she let out. Her voice sounded thick, a couple of tones too low, like she had a cold. Or had been crying. “Samuel L. Simmons.”

Gil quickly scribbled the name on the first piece of paper he could find. Stared at it, too afraid to hope that this was the one lead that would take them to Malcolm. “Dani... how is he?”

On the other side of the line there was silence, a too long pause that spoke volumes about what the young woman did not wish to say. “He's alive,” she ended up replying with a heavy sigh. ”Managed to give us some new tidbits of information on the killer's profile... Bright thinks the killer is a psychology drop-out, cash issues. The guy calls himself the _Professor_.”

“The Professor?” Gil parrot, frowning at the odd name. Usually, a professor was someone people associated with fairness and knowledge, a service given to others for their betterment. Teachers were the shapers of mankind's minds, not killers.

“Yeah... he also mentioned something about a red bird printed on the baseball bat-”

She stopped herself. Arroyo felt a shiver race up his spine. He could almost hear her, chewing on her lower lip. They had all seen the baseball bat in the killer's hands, and Gil had been a detective for long enough to know that Dani's reaction implied that it had been used on Malcolm.

“JT thinks it's a Cardinal's bat, the Saint Louis team,” she eventually finished, her voice small and clipped. “Oh, and boss?” Another long pause, more nervous hesitation, belying her search for the right words to use. “Start the name search with the sex offenders database,” she added in a rush. “We think... JT and I think that this guy might have been booked for indecent exposure at some point in his life,” she pointed out before hanging up.

Gil stood still, barely daring to breathe as he stared at the phone in his hands. One of the first things they had looked up when the bodies started showing up, had been the list of local sex offenders, checking up if any had been active recently, if any of them had progressed to murder. They had found nothing.

The way Powell had spoken, her reluctance... something had happened in that damn video feed, something that she didn't want to share with him. Gil's blood ran cold inside his veins as a million wild guesses popped into his mind. All of them made him sick.

This was what he had been wishing for, wasn't it? A lead, something that could take him closer to rescuing Malcolm. And yet, the Lieutenant felt like someone had just stabbed him in the heart.

He sat on his chair, deflated as he mechanically filled out his badge number and password on the computer. There was no time to wallow in sorrow and heartache. Not now.

First they got Malcolm back alive, then they could deal with the rest. They were running out of time.

~ºº~

Malcolm closed his eyes, willing his mind to stop playing tricks on him. He knew his father wasn't really there and he had no time to waste on hallucinations. Any minute now the killer would be back and he needed to find himself a weapon.

“You know why he set you free, don't you?”

Malcolm pursed his lips, ignoring his father's voice. The crate the Professor had been using as a chair was just four feet away, his gun resting on top of it, forgotten. He had two working limbs, he could get himself out of that damn chair and reach for the gun.

“Your left sartorius muscle is ripped to shreds and from the looks of that bleeding wound, I'm _pretty_ sure that the knife nicked one of the perforating branches of your femoral artery, which means you have about...” he looked at his non-existing wrist watch, “fifteen minutes before you bleed out,” hallucination Martin went on, ignoring the fact that he was being ignored. “And your arm... ufff! We really need to discuss your arm, my boy--”

“Shut up,” Malcolm hissed, the words spit between clenched teeth as he pushed up again. This time he was ready for the intense vertigo that hit him as soon as he was vertical. He closed his eyes, breathing through his nose to control the pain before risking a faltering step forward.

His left leg buckled beneath him, sending Malcolm rushing against the cement floor. With his right arm dead by his side, he barely managed to catch himself before his head smacked hard against the ground, his vision suddenly filled with an explosion of stars.

Bright couldn't move. His whole body was on fire, screaming its grievances at him, and all Malcolm could bare to do was turn his aching head sideways, to rest his cheek against the dirty floor, and breathe.

Blood trickled down against his right eye.

John's face materialized inches from his own, standing too close for comfort, staring sideways at him from across the puddle of blood. Judging him. “You trying to get yourself killed, boy?”

“...no,” Malcolm breathed out. He could feel his entire head pulsing, blood thumbing against his ears, behind his gritty eyes. “I don't wanna die...”

“And yet you stay there on the floor, slobbering like a child, when a gun is within your reach!”

“Got'ra give him a point there, son,” Martin pitched in, staging the loudest of whispers. “You're already on the floor, might as well crawl.”

Malcolm hated to agree with his own hallucinations, but John and his father were not wrong. Using his remaining working limbs, he inched forward.

Moving was excruciating, wounded leg dragging across the ground, the feeling of warm, sticky blood trailing behind his feet, the scrape of the cement floor against his exposed skin. Bright ignored it all, ignored the pain, ignore the helplessness of his situation, ignored his father's cheers and John's jabs, his mind focused solely on achieving his goal. Reaching that gun. Getting himself free.

Malcolm collapsed against the wooden crate, breathing harshly, sweat dripping into his eyes. Walking from his couch to his kitchen counter was twice as far, and yet it felt like he had just run a marathon.

Without stopping to even catch his ragged breath, in fear that he had already wasted too much time, the profiler pulled himself up, leaning his head against the crate, left hand raised, searching blindly for the weapon.

His fingers brushed against cold metal and he desperately fumbled for the gun.

“You shouldn't have done that,” the Professor's voice called out from a distance.

Not Watkins or even his own father had been decent enough to warn Malcolm that he was no longer alone.

~ºº~

There was no Samuel L. Simmons in the sex offenders database, but there was a Samuel _Junior_ Simmons. It was close enough for Gil to start digging in.

The file opened on screen and Gil fished out his reading glasses from the top drawer of his desk. The face staring back at him was too normal, too average. Even nice. He had been secretly hoping that the man would look like a demon, just to justify his own feelings of hatred towards this killer.

The more he read, the more the Lieutenant knew that this was their guy.

Junior was not a psychology dropout, as Malcolm had theorized, but he had been close enough. Instead of dropping out, Simmons had been expelled from the University, for improper conduct during his clinical training at the local psychiatric hospital.

JT and Dani had been right as well. The report was a bit too vague, lacking in details, but it still strongly implied that Simmons had been caught sneaking into a comatose patient room to touch himself. Charges had been officially pressed and the board of psychology had made sure that not only was Simmons registered as a sex offender, but also that he would never practice any form of psychology in his life.

And the kicker of it all? Simmons had been enrolled at the Saint Louis University. “Home of the Cardinals,” Gil whispered to himself.

The home address on file was still from Saint Louis, with a note from the local police saying that they had lost track of Simmons, assuming that he had moved out and failed to report his new address.

None of which told Gil where the hell was Simmons now. After moving out of Missouri, he had obviously found his way to New York, but the city was pretty damn big and he couldn't just go knocking on every house owned by someone named Simmons. And that was assuming that he hadn't used a fake ID for his rental as well.

The Lieutenant leaned back on his chair, pushing his glasses up to rest on his forehead. This was the perfect time for Malcolm to pull one of his crazy assed theories out of thin air and solve the case.

Only he wasn't there to do it. No, he was somewhere in the city, with Simmons, being tortured to death.

_'The guy calls himself the Professor'._

The idea popped inside his head in a voice suspiciously similar to Bright's even though the words had been from Dani. Gil grabbed his phone, suddenly charged with hope.

“Hello?” Gil let out as someone finally picked up on the other side. “Yes, this is Lieutenant Arroyo of the 16th Precinct... I need a list of all psychology professors enrolled in New York city's universities,” he demanded. “Names and photo IDs. This is a matter of life and death.”

~ºº~

Malcolm pulled the gun towards his chest, instinctively pulling the safety off. His left hand shook as he pointed the weapon towards the sound of the man's voice. “Stop or I'll shoot!”

“You _should_ shoot me,” the killer let out, sounding too much at ease for a person with a gun aimed at them. “Before I shoot you,” he added, the sound of another cocking gun echoing in the large space as he stepped out of the shadows and started walking towards him.

“You heard him, son,” Martin urged, bloodlust dripping from his voice. “SHOOT HIM!”

His palm was too sweaty, his hold slippery. Malcolm knew that his aim with his dominant hand was good enough to have passed all of the FBI's weapons' tests with distinction. His left hand, however, was not Malcolm's dominant hand.

The Professor's gun discharged without warning, the bullet hitting the ground next to Malcolm's right hand before he could hear the bang. He flinched, almost losing his hold on his own weapon. His finger convulsed next to the trigger, struggling for direction. “STOP!”

The other gun crackled again, the bullet whistling past his head to hit the ground on his left side this time. Splinters exploded upwards, falling down on Malcolm like glass confetti.

“What are you waiting for, _boy_?” Watkins blared from above him. “Unless you're enjoying all the torture and abuse... is that it? You _like_ it? Just SHOOT HIM!”

The gun shook fiercely in his hands as tears of frustration welled up in Bright's eyes. Had he been holding the gun in his right hand, he could safely aim and fire in a way that would incapacitate the killer without killing him. With his left, shaking as badly as he was... he could either miss the target entirely or worse, kill him.

Despite all that he had suffered at that man's hands, despite knowing for a fact that he was a serial killer, Malcolm couldn't bring himself to end a man's life simply because of bad aim.

The gun fell limply from Bright's hand just as the Professor came to a stop in front of him.

~ºº~

JT was pacing, barely contained fury pushing each step more forcibly against the raw cement floor. Any minute now, he was going to succeed in digging that hole he seemed to be aiming for.

On the screen, Malcolm had been left alone for over two hours now, barely twitching in his unconsciousness. In the quietness that had settled on that side of the camera, they could now hear rain, pelting against the roof. It wasn't much of a clue, as it was raining all over the city, it just served to make them feel more miserable than what they already did.

“You should go home for a bit,” Dani suggested, pulling her knees up on the crate and hugging her coat-covered arms around them. Temperature had dropped in the early hours of dawn. On screen, Malcolm was all but naked and she could only imagine how cold he must be. “Take a shower, hug your wife.”

“Can't hug my wife right now,” the detective let out with a angry sigh. “Not until I make sure that that bastard gets what he deserves,” he let out, words gritted against his teeth as he imagined himself pushing the killer's face against the wall with enough force to break his teeth. He took a deep breath, running both hands across his head, like he was trying to scratch his own brain. “Tally understands,” he admitted in a whisper. “She knows how I get when the job gets to me... gives me the space I need.”

Dani nodded. It was a feeling that she could understand, even if not one of her past boyfriends or girlfriends ever did. JT was lucky to have someone like Tally by his side.

Malcolm moaned on the other side of the screen and they both jumped at the sound. His arms shifted against the restrains, an involuntary movement that had probably unsettled his broken arm. Even then, he did not wake.

JT's phone, set on silence, vibrated inside his pocket. He pulled it out, setting the call on speaker as he saw Gil's name. “We're here boss.”

“Our suspect name is Samuel Junior Simmons,” Gil announced. “Forged his way into an assistant teaching spot at CUNY under the name Joseph Guzman. The photo matches both Simmons and the one you sent from the video.”

“Tell me we got an address,” JT let out.

On the other side of the line, they could almost hear the Lieutenant's smile stretching into a predatory snarl. “We have an address. I'll text you the details. Met me there!”

JT's eyes flickered between Dani and the computer screen, the conflict all too clear in his expressive eyes.

“Go,” Powell offered. She wanted nothing more than be the one to slap a pair of tight handcuffs on the prick who had taken Malcolm, but one of them needed to stay behind. They couldn't abandon their friend to his fate, not when that video feed was their only lifeline to the profiler. “Kick his teeth out for me,” she added. They both knew she hadn't meant it in jest.

~ºº~

“You should've pulled the trigger,” the Professor said, bending down to pick up the weapon that Malcolm had discarded. Now holding two guns in his hands, the killer crouched down, staring Malcolm in the eye. He raised the weapon that the profiler had failed to use and pressed it against his prisoner's forehead.

Bright tensed for a second. A point blank shot to his frontal lobe would be, without a question, fatal. There would be no wiggling room for chance, luck or whatever divine intervention that he might hope for. It would be quick, nearly painless. He closed his eyes, searching his mind for a better image. If this was the last thing he saw, he wanted something better than the face of a smirking, sadistic serial killer.

Behind his lids, Malcolm pictured his mother and sister, both bathed by the sunlight coming in through the living room's big windows in their home, both looking so warm, soft and happy. Gil was standing by his side, smiling proudly at him and at a distance, he could hear JT and Dani talking about something.

Bright had never expected to hear the sound of the bullet that would kill him. Much less had he expected to hear the hollowed click of the hammer hitting an empty chamber.

The Professor pulled the gun away, laughing.

An adrenaline surge that he no longer thought possible, rushed through Malcolm's arteries, his heart pumping wildly in a fight or flight reaction that was coming far too late. The gun had no bullets.

The fucking gun had no _bullets_.

“Did you really thought that I was going to leave you here, alone, with a loaded gun within your reach?” the other man pointed out, tossing the useless weapon away. It clattered against the floor, skidding away.

Malcolm looked up, eyes clouded by sweat and tears. Had his brain been functioning normally, he would have noticed before that the killer had no water in his hands. He had never intended to get him water. It had all been just one more game, one more way to fuck with him. “Why?”

The Professor stood up, pacing. There was an unmistakable sense of pride to his stride. “Don't you see? Your worst fear, Malcolm... I just proved how unfounded it is,” he pointed out with a flourish. “If you can't shoot me to save your own life... how can you ever become your father?”

Somewhere at a distance, Martin huffed his displeasure.

The profiler blinked, not quite believing his ears. Years and years of therapy and carefully balanced medication... and this _idiot_ thought that he could solve all of Malcolm's problems with some half-assed theatrics and an empty gun?

“You must feel better now?” the killer worded it like a question, but the demanding tone left no doubts on what the answer should be. “Free of your fear, ready to be a normal person!”

Malcolm could feel himself slipping away. The blood loss and the effort he had wasted in reaching that useless gun, everything was catching up to him, demanding a price for stretching the boundaries of what his body could do. And yet, he had just now managed to figure out what the killer's motive was. It had been staring him in the face the whole time. “You... you don't want to fix your vi-victims,” Bright whispered, words falling like tar from his mouth. “You're trying to fix yourself.”

~ºº~

It was the second time that night that Gil found himself standing behind a door, with a SWAT team, ready to kick it open. Although, it wasn't technically night time anymore, not with the time he had wasted chasing down a judge in the middle of the night to sign him a arrest warrant for Simmons.

The sun was just beginning to seep through the city's landscape, chasing away the rainy night and bathing the skyscrapers in a golden, soft light. It looked so pure and innocent that it provided a harsh contrast against everything that had been happening in the cover of the night.

The uniforms had knocked on a few doors, showing Simmons' picture and asking his mostly still asleep neighbors if they had ever seen the man. One had recognized him from the photo as the professor who drove a cab. It was all Gil needed to hear to know that he was in the right place.

The apartment certainly wasn't big enough to account for the background image they could see on the video feed, but that was definitely Simmons' home. The last place the killer expected them to come knocking.

On the other side of the doorframe, JT looked expectantly at his commanding officer. His fingers caressed the side of his gun, an unconscious piece of body language that the other man was most certainly not aware. It was something the detective always did whenever he was overeager to take down some bad guy.

Gil shared the feeling. He gave a tense nod to the SWAT team commander.

The apartment door shattered under the weight of the battering ram, cheap wood splintering like sugar glass. “NYPD! Samuel Simmons, show yourself! Come out with your hands where we can see them!”

The house was empty. Not only was it devoid of human life, but of everything else. No furniture, no drapes, not a single sign of anyone living a life inside it. There was a mattress in the middle of the living room and a few discarded pizza boxes serving as a night stand. Other than that-

“In here!” one of the SWAT team members called out, standing by the door of the only closed room in the house.

Gil didn't remembering moving, but suddenly he was there, standing by the man's side. He had expected a dark room, given that there were no windows on that side of the house. Instead, he was greeted by the blue glow of multiple screens, all of them running different images, a cacophony of sound that made their ears hurt.

The Lieutenant stared at the images on the screens, his eyes tearing as he recognized most of the men from his white board at the precinct and Edrisa's table. All the victims were there. All immortalized on the killer's recordings. All made to suffer for eternity at his hands, even after they were gone.

They had found the killer's nerve center.

A particular screen caught Gil's eye, making him swear out loud. 

Malcolm.

The last time the Lieutenant had seen the profiler, Malcolm had been sitting on a chair, looking nervous but unharmed. It was a shock to see the toll a few hours had taken on the young man. A flitting glance towards JT told him that the other man wasn't sharing his surprised, just his heartache.

Bright's face was ashen, a sickly pallor that drowned all color from his face, whitewashing his lips and making the bruises under his eyes look bloody red.

He was slumped on the floor, holding his right arm against his chest. His left leg, extended in front of him, was an ugly mess of blood and dirt. 

And the killer, who should have been there, who should have been in cuffs by now, was there. Standing above Malcolm, holding a gun in his hands.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, a warning. A rape attempt tag had been added to the story because of this chapter. While nothing graphic happens, there are some implied situations. Also, there is mention of past child abuse, even though no details are mentioned.
> 
> Second, a heartfelt thank you! Jameena, you ARE THE BEST! Thank you for cleaning this up, not only in a perfect way, but also super-human fast!

~º~

Jessica was slowly going insane. Hadn't she been through this just a few weeks before?

  
  


Well, more than that, she supposed. But then again, what was the socially acceptable period of time between being kidnapped by serial killers? Because whatever that was, Malcolm was most certainly being extremely rude.

  
  


God...her poor boy!

  
  


Sometimes Jessica wondered if all the wrong doings of all the Milton's, throughout the centuries, were coming back all at once, everyone of their sins being paid by her son.

  
  


It was an old family, with traces all the way back to Jacobean England, with plenty of skeletons in the closet, even before Martin started adding up his.

  
  


John Milton, the poet, had been a distant relative, as well as a libertine. Then again, Jessica assumed that everyone was one in the 17th century. Rupert Milton, a few centuries after that, had robbed all he could from the family before escaping to the Orient to open a opium den. Her great-aunt, on her mother's side, had run a bootleg operation, back in the day.

  
  


Certainly none of them were murderers or some other kind of unspeakable monstrosity, but small misdeeds added up and somewhere along the line, someone had to pay for all of that, she supposed. It wasn't like Jessica believed in Karma, but how else could she explain all the crap that transpired in her family without finding herself howling to the moon?

...perhaps after she raided her stash of _good_ pills.

  
  


She looked at her cellphone, willing it to ring. She could only hope that Malcolm would be as 'lucky' this time around as he had been when that _putrid_ John character had taken him. But how could she dared to hope, when they had already been lucky once?

  
  


~º~

There was something very liberating about having absolutely no one around to watch you crumble and fall.

  
  


Dani was nothing but a sobbing mess on the floor as she stood alone, the silent witness to everything that was happening to Malcolm.

  
  


She was the only one there as he woke up.

  
  


She alone saw as an look of absolute horror and disgust took over his face as he quickly put two and two together and figured out what had happened while he was unconscious.

  
  


She was the only one who heard as he broke and sobbed, begging them to spare his family from the details of his capture.

  
  


She was the sole recipient of his goodbye.

  
  


Powell screamed with him as the knife was pulled mercilessly from the profiler's leg, and she shared his confusion as the killer simply cut him free and walked away.

  
  


At first, Dani had thought the Professor left because he had somehow been alerted to the fact that Gil and JT were closing in on him, but she knew that couldn't be.

  
  


JT had sent her a message a few minutes back, saying that they were still waiting on the warrant's green light.

  
  


This was an arrest that none of them wanted to mess up. When this guy went down, they wanted to make sure that he went down for life, even if it meant wasting a few more minutes on a piece of paper.

  
  


Watching Malcolm slowly drag himself through the dirty floor, talking nonsense to nonexistent people and clearly out of his mind, had been possibly the worst thing Dani had ever endured.

  
  


She tasted blood on her tongue, pulling her finger away to stare at the broken skin. She felt too numb to experience any pain, even though she knew that her nail, gnawed to the flesh, was probably throbbing.

  
  


On screen, Malcolm finally reached the gun. A part of Powell's brain was telling her that this was a trap, that the weapon had been too conveniently forgotten within reach, that despite the superhuman effort it had taken Bright to reach it, it was still too easy.

  
  


Even so, she couldn't help but root for her friend as Malcolm pointed the gun at the killer when the man made his presence known, gunshot after gunshot. “Shoot him!” she founded herself yelling, even though the profiler couldn't hear her. She could barely see Malcolm, had no idea if those bullets had found their mark or not. “Goddamnit, Bright! Shoot that motherfucker already!”

  
  


The angle was all wrong for her to see any details of Malcolm's face, the crate he was leaning against covering most of his form. But Dani could see his extended arm, the gun shaking in his left hand. She could see the moment when the profiler surrendered and let the weapon drop to the ground. “No, please... don't give up... not you too.”

  
  


This was too much for her to handle. She had spent most of her adult life trying to understand why her father, an experienced police officer, had been shot during a _simple_ home violence call. Neighbors had made the call as they heard a woman screaming inside the house; her dad had gone in ahead of his partner, believing it to be just like any other case of domestic violence where the husband was the attacker. That had been his one mistake, as the woman pulled a gun on him and fired. Her dad hadn't even tried to reach for his own gun.

  
  


Her father had been a good man, who died because he believed in the goodness of others. Dani had been sixteen when she had sworn to herself that she would never make the same mistake as her father.

  
  


Malcolm didn't believe he was a good person at all. You could see in the way he talked to suspects all the time, always looking for their redeeming qualities, always seeking to justify their actions. Because if they could find redemption, so could he, on day.

  
  


Malcolm didn't believe that he was a good person, but he always assumed that others were. Even when the 'others' included a serial killer who had been torturing him all night.

  
  


Dani was certain that her heart had come to a standstill as the killer pressed the gun Malcolm had dropped to the profiler's head. Her phone, clutched in her hand, remained stubbornly silent as she waited for news from Gil and JT. The only exception was the occasional text message from Edrisa, asking for updates.

They needed to come through that door right now, or they would be too late.

  
  


The click of an empty barrel echoed loudly in the large room where the killer was keeping Malcolm, and for a second, Powell thought she had heard an actual gunshot. Her phone dropped from her numb fingers, her eyes fixed on the screen.

  
  


She hated that Malcolm was slumped behind that crate, where she couldn't see him, couldn't reassure herself that he was still alive until he spoke.

  
  


_An empty gun._

  
  


The killer laughed like it was all one big joke.

  
  


If there ever was someone who deserved the title of monster, the Professor was it. The way he took pleasure in tormenting Malcolm with an empty gun, taunting him with a glimpse of freedom only to pull the rug from under his feet...it was cruel beyond measure.

  
  


It was how he destroyed his victims' will, sucking all hope from their hearts until they simply gave up.

  
  


Dani wasn't much of a religious person, but she found herself praying now with a devotion that she wasn't sure where to aim.

  
  


Praying for the police to burst through those doors.

  
  


Praying for Malcolm to hold on.

  
  


Praying for mercy for herself, because she was pretty sure that seeing Malcolm die would end up destroying her.

~º~

“What did you just say?”

  
  


The question was meant as a dare, the words clipped and hidden behind a thick veil of promised violence. Any other time, it should have been enough warning for Malcolm to keep his mouth shut.

  
  


“You're trying to fix yourself,” he repeated, heedless of how his words were affecting the killer. “Because someone in your past made you believe that you are broken.”

  
  


“You're full of shit!” the Professor hissed out, raising his gun to point at Malcolm's face. “You think that because daddy was a notorious serial killer and your rich bitch mommy paid for an expensive degree, you know _anything_ about anything?”

  
  


Bright ignored the weapon in front of him, its metallic black mouth wavering in a mesmerizing motion, like a poisonous serpent ready to strike, ready to claim his life. He wasn't paying attention to any of that, it was an unimportant detail in an otherwise bigger picture. He was too lost in his analysis of the killer's psyche to pay attention to the scenery or even his own aching body. “I know what it's like to feel incomplete, unfinished...to look at others with envy b-because they get to be normal,” Malcolm pressed on, his gaze steady as he stared into the killer’s eyes. “I know how angry you can get at the unfairness of it all.”

  
  


“Shut up!” the Professor snarled, hands moving up to press his palms against his eyes. The gun smacked hard on his forehead, but the Professor hardly noticed it. “You don't know, you weren't there!”

  
  


Malcolm inched closer, knowing he was getting through. The pieces were clicking inside his head at such ferocious speed and intensity that it was making him dizzy. Suddenly, it was like someone had pulled a veil from over his eyes and he could finally _see_. The way the killer compulsively denied his sexual preferences, the fact that he only seemed to be aroused by inanimate sexual partners, the way he both loved and hated men with every fiber of his being... “It was your father, wasn't it?”

  
  


“Shut up! Shut up! Shut UP!”

  
  


The Professor's hands had moved from his eyes to his temples, rubbing compulsively at the skin, a psychosomatic gesture of comfort that Malcolm could have recognized from a mile away. “What did he do to you? Was he angry when you told him that you liked boys? Did he beat you?” Bright ventured, watching the other man closely, searching for the one reaction that would tell him he had guessed right. “No...he did something far worse, didn't he? He somehow tried to make you like women, perhaps even pushing you into experiencing the touch of one...”

  
  


The Professor's breath hitched almost imperceptibly as he took a step back, physically recoiling from Malcolm's words.

  
  


“That was it, wasn't it? He forced you to have sex with a woman.”

  
  


The self-comforting movement stopped, the other man's hands frozen in position, shaking. Malcolm took a momentary perverse sense of satisfaction in knowing that it was his turn to cause pain. He was the one holding the bat now.

  
  


It was, however, short lived. Despite the pain and anger, Bright couldn't help but feel somewhat sorry for the killer. He could almost imagine a teenage version of the Professor, struggling to be accepted by an ignorant, closed-minded, abusive father, ultimately resulting in an unspeakable act of violence to 'correct' the boy's sexuality.

  
  


Malcolm could almost understand why the killer could only have sex with unconscious and inanimate corpses; with them, at least, he felt safe and in control. “What he did was wrong,” Malcolm pushed forward, taking advantage of the man's stunned reaction. He was so close to having a hold on him, bringing him to the other side... “No one should be forced into something that they don't like or desire...the only one that needed fixing was your father, for being a monst--”

  
  


The Professor went from being solid as a statue to moving like a spider- a disjointed, mechanical motion bringing him over to the profiler, hand steady as he pointed the gun up.

And fired.

  
  


“My father was not a _monster_!” the Professor hissed. “He was a decent, hardworking man, who raised me on his own when no one else would! He FIXED me, he put me back on track to be a decent man, just like him! The hooker was a gift, an act of pure selflessness to show me the right path, something someone like you will never understand!”

  
  


Malcolm could see the man's lips moving, but he wasn't registering a single word he was saying. All he could focus on was the hole in his chest, suddenly gushing with blood. It felt alien to him, like he was seeing it in a movie, and for a moment the profiler wondered if he wasn't simply hallucinating the gunshot wound.

  
  


“That's no hallucination, my boy,” Martin confirmed with a degree of medical expertise, kneeling down next to him, scrunched nose and a grim look in his face. “I'm afraid you're quite screwed this time.”

  
  


“I t-think you're right, d-dad,” Malcolm whispered, just before he lost his last grip on the conscious world.

  
  


~º~

  
  


“He can't be that far from here,” Gil voiced under a sigh. At least, that was what Bright would say if he was there, telling them that the killer wouldn't stray far from his most prized possession, that he would keep his huntings grounds close to home. Not that they had any evidence of that inside the house, but Arroyo had never known the profiler to be wrong about something like that.

  
  


They had all the evidence they would ever need to lock this guy up for life, glued to the walls of the small room, playing on repeat on the TV screens. And yet, they were missing a vital piece. “There has to be some receipt, some delivery address, some damn sticky note to tell us where this guy is! Find it!”

  
  


The Lieutenant was clearly spiraling out of control, but there wasn't a single officer present that could really blame him, not after what they had all seen.

  
  


For a moment, as they all found the TV screens, Gil was sure that he had arrived at the killer's house in time to see Malcolm be executed. The killer had a gun pressed to the profiler's head and no one inside that room had dared to breathe, an irrational fear response that their actions might perhaps trigger the killer's finger on the gun miles from there. He did fire, without hesitation, and Gil had felt his legs grow weak. It was the killer's laughter and Malcolm's voice that gave him the strength to look back at the image and see that it had all been a ruse, a sick game from a sick mind.

  
  


In that moment, Gil realized that they had been given a reprieve and the Lieutenant wasn't planning on wasting it.

  
  


They were so close, and yet all that they could do for the missing profiler was stare at the screen and pray that the killer waving a gun in his face wouldn't just shoot.

  
  


Neighbors had started piling up on the hall outside, attracted by the commotion and the constant flow of police officers and crime lab team members up and down the stairs of the building. JT had been managing the crowd, working his way through those who would speak, trying to gather as much information on the man as he could. There was, however, very little to gather.

  
  


The killer was a loner, keeping to himself, coming and going at odd hours of the day. There had been a wife at some point, but no one had seen her for months, so everyone had assumed that the man had just divorced.

Some of the neighbors weren't even aware that the apartment had been rented at all. They did managed to get him the landlord's name, an important piece of the puzzle that they had yet to complete.

Samuel Simmons.

Who apparently owned about ten of the apartments in that building and was a nasty piece of work. He was also not picking up the phone, so they would need to track down his address.

  
  


Right now, however, there was only one piece of information that mattered to the Lieutenant in charge of the scene, and that was the one thing that he couldn't find.

“Lieutenant Arroyo, I think we have something here!” one of the guys from the crime lab called to him. He was standing by the back wall, motioning him over. Reluctantly, Gil moved away from the TV screens. “See this discoloration here, sir?”

“Not mold?” the Lieutenant ventured, because he seriously doubted that the guy would have looked that excited over a piece of festering fungus.

“No, sir, I've just tested the fluid oozing from the plaster,” the guy said with a grim look, holding a white piece of plastic in his gloved hand. “It's human. There's a body behind this wall.”

Gil had seen a lot of messed up shit in his career, but this was reaching a whole new level of batshit. “Smash it open,” he motioned for the guy with the battering ram.

In a matter of minutes, they had a hole parallel to the sinister stain of the wall. The Lieutenant flashed his light inside, already with a pretty good guess about who he would find. “It's a woman,” he called out, gagging at the smell. “JT, I think we found the missing wife.”

“Damn...” the tall detective let out with a whistle. “Inside the damn wall?”

“Sir,” one of the SWAT team members called out, pulling their attention away from the gory sight. Under the black helmet and all the tactical equipment, it was impossible to tell who he was, other than what his rank was.

  
  


“Go ahead, Private,” Arroyo nodded. The man sounded like he had something important to say.

  
  


The man was looking at the top screen, the one currently playing the last days in the life of Javier Martinez, the first victim they had found. The camera was slightly angled down, some sunlight streaming through high windows, allowing them to see more of the room.

There were tall pillars as far as the eye could see and on the floor, at seemingly regular distances, round holes. “I think I know where this is, sir,” the Private went on, gloved finger pointing at the holes on the ground. “See these here? Those are the silo's vents in the old Red Hook Grain Terminal five minutes from here. I believe the suspect is using the room above the silos.”

  
  


Gil stared at the man, seeing his own reflection on the policeman's dark helmet. He looked like someone who'd just found a fifty dollar bill on the sidewalk. “You sure about this, Private?”

  
  


Gil was unfamiliar with the place. Sure, he’d seen the old eyesore near the Brooklyn harbor, but as it had never been a part of his beat, he had never stepped a foot inside.

  
  


In front of him, the young man nodded. “Positive!”

  
  


Arroyo could have kissed that kid in gratitude. He restrained himself, patting his shoulder instead. “Well done, then! Let's get a move o--”

  
  


The sound of a gun discharging came thought the speakers, muffling all else happening on the screens. Frantically, Gil searched every TV for the source of the shot, internally listing every victim and which ones had shown evidence of a gunshot wound. His eyes eventually settled on the one screen he had been avoiding.

  
  


Last time he had checked, Malcolm and the killer were talking. The man had been holding a gun, but nothing in his body language made Gil think that he was about to shoot anyone anytime soon. The killer had seemed relaxed, at ease, clearly confident that he had the upper hand.

  
  


In the few minutes Gil had diverted his attention, the world had turned upside down. The killer's face was red with anger, and he was screaming at Malcolm, claiming that his father was not a monster. And Malcolm...

  
  


The Lieutenant took in the sight, frozen in place. A fountain of red sprung from the middle of Bright's chest, blood pouring freely, thick like oil, pooling down his stomach before crimson tendrils extended to the sides.

  
  


He was too late. They had finally found out where Malcolm was, but he was too late to get the kid alive.

  
  


“Boss...”

  
  


JT's voice sounded from far away, a foreign language that Gil had no energy to understand.

  
  


“Gil... we need to move out,” the detective whispered. “While we still can.”

  
  


Arroyo looked up, finding his own unshed tears in the other man's eyes. JT blinked, salt water tracing a pattern down his cheek.

  
  


JT Tarmel, no nonsense detective extraordinaire, shedding tears over Malcolm Bright, general pain in the ass profiler.

  
  


Malcolm would never believe it. “He's dead,” Gil found himself whispering. He had failed the kid, failed Jessica...God, Jessica...

  
  


“You don't know that!” JT barked. “You can't know that...” the tall man repeated quietly, his gaze intense as he stared at his superior officer. “And even if he is, we can still save him from whatever comes next,” he urged, his mouth twisting like he had just tasted something vile.

  
  


Gil's eyes hardened under JT's words. If the other man was implying what he thought he was, that meant that being dead wouldn’t be the end of Malcolm's torment. _If_ he was dead... which they didn't know. Until he had two fingers on Malcolm's pulse, he couldn't know. And... and if the worst case scenario came to pass, they couldn't afford to leave the profiler's body in the killer's hands for a single second more.

  
  


“You're right... I--I,” Gil stuttered, gathering his wits about him. He was a commanding officer in the NYPD, head of Major Crimes, a policeman with forty years under his belt. He could be an agent of the law first and a distraught father later. “Let's move out!”

  
  


~º~

  
  


Edrisa was waiting by the phone. She had texted Dani a couple of times, but the detective had stopped answering after a while.

  
  


It was hard, being the one on the outside. Helpless to land a hand. Condemned to wait.

  
  


She knew what was going on, because a precinct was worse than a small village and gossip was the life force that propelled the boys in blue. This time, she knew a bit more than the gossipers, but not enough.

  
  


Everyone was talking about how Malcolm had managed to get himself snatched by yet another serial killer, like he had some sort of magnet for the guys or something. She thought it was because he just _that_ good at his job.

  
  


Edrisa was worried, but she worried alone, away from the eyes of the others, hidden in her office, staring at the melting cake.

  
  


That night was supposed to have been filled with happiness and joy. She had imagined the beautiful smile on Bright's face as he saw the blood splattered cake, imagined him perhaps relaxing enough to take off his jacket, roll up his sleeves and blow out all the candles. There would be singing, and then she would hand him her gift. A huge bowl of Dum-Dums.

  
  


Instead, the bowl was sitting on her desk and the cake had been left forgotten, melting away, never to be enjoyed as everyone scattered away to search for the profiler.

  
  


Forgotten, like she had been.

  
  


Edrisa looked at her drawer, where her emergency Xanax pill bottle rested, hidden behind the leftovers from lunch. It was tempting, she knew it would help, but it would also dull her senses, and she wanted to be ready.

  
  


Malcolm might need her. “ _Damn it, Edrisa, you'll never learn, will you?_ ” she whispered to herself.

  
  


Last time, no one had told her anything. She had been forced to use her credentials to find out if Malcolm was even alive, because everyone had simply forgotten to warn her of his condition. It hadn't been overzealous on her part, just plain despair.

  
  


This time around, however, she wasn't going to be so passive. Or maybe she was.

  
  


The only thing that she couldn't really handle was having Malcolm Bright on her table, ready to be open and studied.

  
  


Her eyes drifted towards the current body under the white sheet. _Don't look at it!_

  
  


He was about the same build as Bright, perhaps an inch taller, smaller shoulders. And yet, it was all too easy to picture the profiler under that sheet, dead.

  
  


That beautiful mind, forever lost.

There was no beauty in death. There was no such thing as beautiful corpses, no matter what Hollywood wanted people to think. People lost something in death, other than their last breath. That sparkle that made people human, shinier than the brightest star.

  
  


Not even Bright could bring grace to death. He would be just like the corpse under the sheet, victim of a violent death, robbed of his remaining years by a vicious killer that cared about nothing else but his own satisfaction.

  
  


It was maddening, that sense of powerlessness, that knowledge that the only comfort she was able to bring the dead was by making sure that they were not forgotten, that they were avenged.

  
  


_The dead do not suffer the living to pass_ , Tolkien had written. But the living would suffer her. She texted Dani again.

  
  


~º~

Junior looked from the dead body on the floor to the recording camera. He tucked his gun, still warm from firing, against the small of his back. He liked the sensuous feeling of warm metal against skin, an instrument of death brushing against live tissue.

  
  


He moved towards the camera, clicking it off. He had shown his work to the police, proven how good he was at what he did. What came next was not for their eyes, he alone deserved the reward.

  
  


He flicked his switchblade open as he walked back to the corpse, the knife meticulously clean of all the blood covering it before. His thumb caressed over the engraving on the knife, his father's name, his name. It was comforting to feel his father's presence so close to him even now.

  
  


Samuel Senior had been so proud of him, first when he enrolled in his Psychology degree and then later, when he married Harriet. Behaving as a man should, doing what was right.

  
  


When his father had passed away, six months ago, Junior had decided to do for others what his father had done for him. Give his contribution for the betterment of others. Teach them how to overcome their frailties and defects.

  
  


Giuseppe had been his first. In the beginning, before the bat had done its work, they had talked in English, as the man eventually confessed that he had not come to the States in search of a better life, but rather escaping the wife and daughter he had left behind, in Naples.

  
  


After a while, he would only blabber in Italian and conversation became pointless. He had killed him when could teach him no more.

  
  


After that one, Junior had made sure he stuck with subjects who spoke only English for a while.

  
  


Francois, however, had been impossible to resist. The man had looked so lost and deflated as he walked out of the airport that Junior had no choice but to pick him. Conversation had been short as the man insisted on speaking only French with him.

  
  


Malcolm had been...inevitable. He was the Yin to his Yang, both of them scholars of the human mind. He was the ultimate challenge that Junior had been waiting for.

  
  


At first, he had planned nothing but to take his revenge at the police, for defacing his beautiful pieces of art. To see those brutes walk over his work, covering up the carefully displayed bodies, undoing all of his meticulously planned labour...

  
  


The sight had left him enraged, possessed by a hatred so profound that he had barely enjoyed his next pupil, had finished too quickly, forgetful of the fragility of the human body. Of how easily the human mind could be broken.

  
  


But Malcolm had proven to be exactly what he needed to complete his work. Junior had looked him up online, easily uncovering the link between the profiler and the Surgeon. Despite the name change, it was impossible to shatter a connection like that.

  
  


Unlike him, Malcolm had never known the true wonders of having a good father, a caring man that spared no expense to take care of his son. He had probably never known the enlightening aspects of a thick leather belt upon his back, spoiled rich boy that he was. He had certainly never gone to bed with an ache so deep in his stomach that could only come from being denied food for days on end, until he saw reason.

  
  


Malcolm had had none of that. And yet, he was strong. Perhaps stronger than what Junior would prefer, but then again, he wouldn't be much of a challenge if that was not the case.

  
  


In the end, he had achieved his goals. He always did, whether it took a day or a week, and he had proven to the profiler that his worst fear was unfounded.

  
  


Junior took off his sweatpants before kneeling down next to Malcolm, setting the gun nearby. The floor was a mess of blood and dust, a muddy sludge that would be hell to clean off his clothes later. So, he was best without them.

  
  


On some level, he was aware that what he was doing was wrong. There weren't that many people around who liked to lay with the dead as he did, and even if they liked it, most people were too afraid to admit it.

  
  


His father would've probably not approved either, but in any case, it was better than to lay with men. Anything was better than that.

Except for Harriet. Harriet was no fun, with all her crying and whining.

  
  


The switchblade was sharp, he took good care of it. It sliced through the corpse's underwear with ease, barely nicking the still warm flesh underneath.

  
  


Junior's breath caught as he looked at his complete work. It was a marvelous sight, one that would have certainly made his father proud.

  
  


He held the blade to his chest, his eyes mesmerized by the colorful map of bruises and blood at his reach. He had done that, he had created that marvelous sight.

  
  


“NYPD! Drop the knife, step away from him and put your hands in the air! NOW!”

  
  


~º~

  
  


JT was aware that they needed to move slowly and careful. One wrong move and the guy could slip from their grasp. The building was a huge ass monstrosity by the side of the river, but fortunately for them, the sharp eyes of one element of SWAT had narrowed down their choices to one room.

  
  


When he saw that bastard taking off his pants and kneeling down next to Bright, like a vulture descending on his prey, the detective had literally seen red. “NYPD! Drop the knife, step away from him and put your hands in the air! NOW!”

  
  


He didn't care if he had stepped on the SWAT team's toes. He didn't care that he had probably overstepped his boundaries, broken protocol, bended the rules, whatever! JT just needed that monster to get the fuck away from Bright right that exact second.

  
  


Bright, who hadn't moved an inch since they had stepped inside. From where he stood, JT couldn't even see if the profiler's chest was moving.

  
  


The killer wasn't moving either. He was frozen in place, a sad figure in his white briefs and grey t-shirt, kneeling in a puddle of blood. Malcolm's blood.

  
  


“You're too late,” the killer taunted them. He seemed all too unfazed by the number of automatic assault rifles aimed at his head. “He already left... what's left behind is mine!”

  
  


“The fuck it is!” Gil let out. Like the rest of them, his gun was sighted on the killer. The barrel trembled in his strangling grip. “Get away from him... this is your last warning!”

  
  


“Or you'll do what?” the man coldly asked, tilting his head to the side. “Kill me? Like you so eagerly look like you want to do anyway?”

  
  


JT tensed. Any other time, he knew that the Lieutenant had a cool head on his shoulders, that he was a much too seasoned and upstanding kind of guy for anyone to even doubt his code of conduct.

These, however, were not normal circumstances. Not when Malcolm's body was laying less than five feet away from them; not with the killer holding a knife in his hands that he had just used to cut the last piece of clothing off the profiler's skin; not when they knew what he was just about to do.

If JT was having a hard time controlling his urge to put a bullet between that bastard's eyes, he couldn't even imagine how it would feel like for someone who had helped raise the kid. Gil's finger was much too close to the trigger for comfort. “Boss...” he advised under his breath. “Gil, he ain't worth it.”

  
  


“So,” the killer let out, his interest piqued at the name. “You're Gil...”

The killer's eyes turned cold as he watched the Lieutenant in a new light. For a moment, JT thought he had caught a glint of jealousy in there. “I would say that he died with your name on his lips, but that would be a lie... do you want to know the last thing he said?”

  
  


“Shut the hell up!”

  
  


“Dad...He called me dad, of all things,” the killer said with a bout of vicious laughter.

  
  


The single gunshot echoed inside the vast space quickly followed by a howl of pain from the killer as he collapsed on top of Malcolm. The SWAT team tensed, fingers twitching on their guns, knowing that the shot hadn't come from one of them.

  
  


For a moment, JT was sure that Gil had been the one pulling the trigger. No one would have blamed him for it. But he hadn't, hand still frozen in the air, his gun unused. He looked as surprised as everyone else.

  
  


For half a second, there was absolute silence, as everyone tried to figure out where the shot had come from. A gun clattered to the cement floor, metal scratching on grain, followed by a pained moan.

  
  


“Get th-this... piece of sh-shit off of m-me!”

  
  


His voice was nothing but a faint whisper, breathless and weak, but it was definitely Malcolm's voice.

  
  


Time resumed its usual pace, playing catch up as everyone erupted in frantic movement. SWAT moved in on the suspect, while Gil and JT rushed to the profiler's side.

  
  


Despite the fact that the bullet had shattered the killer's knee, no one seemed overly concerned about his agonized, pathetic cries as they unceremoniously dragged him away from Malcolm. Over the radio, they could hear someone giving the waiting EMTs the go ahead to enter the scene.

  
  


“Shit, kid...” was the only thing that Gil was able to utter as he dropped down near Bright, pulling his gloves out and tossing them aside. He quickly searched his tactical gear pockets, fishing out the tightly packet thermal blanket and unfolding it over Malcolm's naked body. By his side, he could see JT copying his actions. It wasn't much, but at least they could protect his dignity in the few seconds before the EMTs arrived. “You don't look so hot right now. Can you open your eyes for us?”

  
  


Malcolm’s lips twisted. An attempt at a smile that came out more like a pained grimace. “Si-silver has always b-been my color,” he stuttered, pulling the blankets closer to his chin with his left hand, even though his eyes remained closed. “Is he d-dead?”

  
  


JT couldn't quite read the tone of Malcolm's question. One would assume that, after everything he had been through, Bright would want nothing more than to know that bastard was no longer breathing. But then again, this was Bright...and he sounded actually concerned for the killer. “You got him in the leg...fucker might end up limping, but he will live, don't worry.”

  
  


“Go-good,” the injured man whispered, his body relaxing under their eyes.

  
  


“Hey! Hey, kid!” Gil called out. His hands hovered above the profiler's form, uncertain of where he could touch without causing further damage. He finally settled for his cheek. “Come on...we just got here! You gotta stay awake.”

Malcolm, however, had a nasty habit of never listening when Gil told him to do something. This time was no different.

Gil's hand moved from the kid's face to his neck, searching for a pulse. He looked up after a beat, eyes bulging in alarm. “I can't find it, JT...”

The Lieutenant's hands were shaking, a parody of the same affliction that usually haunted Bright.

JT freed his hands from the thick combat gloves, pushing two fingers against the man's neck. His own grip grew unsteady as he failed to feel anything pushing back against his fingertips.

Bright's shaky-hand condition was, apparently, seriously contagious.

“Can't find one either,” Tarmel confessed, barely hidden panic making his voice unsteady. Where the hell were those EMTs?!

In despair, the detective' hand moved from Malcolm's neck, disappearing under the thermal blankets, going directly for the femoral artery. He'd read it somewhere, something about deep pulses being the last ones to go. If he couldn't find a beat there...”I got it! I got a pulse!”

Apparently, those were the magic words that made the EMTs suddenly materialize by their side. They wasted no time pushing them away, open bags and gear sprouting around Bright like it was a fertile plowed field. “It's okay,” one of them let out. “We got it from here.”

JT and Gil suddenly found themselves standing apart from the main action, two isolated ships in the midst of a sea storm, adrift.

The detective looked at his right hand. There was blood on his fingers. A reminder that he should have been faster, better. A declaration of his failure. His guilt.

He wiped his hand clean on his vest, unable to stand the sight any longer.

All they could do was watch.

Watch as the EMTs struggled to stabilize Malcolm just enough to get him to the bus, concerned looks traded between the two of them as they thought no one would notice.

Watch Gil falling to his knees, tears leaking from his eyes without shame or restrain.

  
  


JT was sick and tired of watching. Instead, he picked up his phone and hit Powell's number. “We got him, Dani,” he whispered, holding on to that one piece of good news. “We got him.”

~º~

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I guess this isn't the last chapter? Surprise!


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To all of you who read casually, read deeply, laughed, cried and bit your nails with this story, I thank you for sharing this experience with me. See you around!

~º~

As the screen on the computer in front of Dani had gone dark, the detective knew without a doubt that everything was lost. The Professor had shot Malcolm in a bout of pure rage and there wasn't a single cop in sight to stop the killer or help the profiler. And now she was blind and deaf, her only link to Malcolm snuffed out with the flip of a switch.

If she thought seeing what was going on was bad, she hadn't been prepared for the not knowing, the vast infinite of probabilities and guess work. 

Dani had found herself on the floor, looking up at the ceiling, unable to move. Just breathing. In and out.

Powell had been with the force for five years now. The worst thing that had ever happened on the job had been losing herself in the arrogant concept that she could experiment drugs without getting addicted.

She had almost lost her own life, but she had never lost a partner. 

Until now.

Powell wasn't sure what hurt the most. The fact that he had died alone, at the hands of a killer they had failed to capture in time, or that she had never got to tell him how she felt about him.

She loved him like a brother, and yet, Dani was sure Malcolm was barely convinced of the sincerity of her friendship. Time and time again she had felt the need to reassure him that yes, she was his friend, that she honestly cared for him. But he seemed untrained on the subject matter, unable to recognize the sentiment.

Friendship devoid of hidden interests and selfish agendas was as unfamiliar to Bright as long, restful, sleepy nights. It was just not a part of who he was.

And now she would never get to tell him, because he was dead. 

Her phone buzzed against the floor, forgotten when it had fallen from her cold hands. Dani reached for it, knowing that JT would let her know as soon as he had news. She wasn't ready to hear his confirmation over the phone. Saying the words would make it real, would truly mean that it was over.

It wasn't JT. Edrisa had texted her again, anxious to know what was happening. Dani sobbed as she looked at the screen, her fingers frozen above the letters she needed to use to let the other woman know. She couldn't bring herself to type the two simple words: _'he's dead_ '.

This was going to break the tiny medical examiner's heart. Edrisa had been Malcolm's number one fan since the first day he had shown up for work. She had been so excited about the whole birthday party thing, so genuinely happy to bring a piece of joy into the profiler's life...

The phone in her hands came to life again, drawing Dani back to the harsh reality. She looked at the screen, mouth going dry as she saw that it was indeed JT's name on the display this time around. 

She knew why he was calling. They had probably reached Malcolm's location by now, and whether or not they had been successful in capturing the killer, Dani knew what JT was going to tell her. It wasn't the kind of news that you deliver over a text message, which was why he was calling her. “Powell,” she answered, closing her eyes, steeling herself for the next couple of seconds. She needed to be strong.

“ _We got him, Dani,”_ he said, voice laced with hope. _“We got him.”_

At first Dani figured she had heard wrong. That her ears had delivered what her heart wanted to hear. But there was no mistaking the veiled relief in JT's words. Even though he hadn't said the word ALIVE, it was still clear that what they had found in that crime scene was not a dead body as she had feared. 

Dani blinked, feeling like a tremendous weight had just been lifted from her chest. She sat up, breathing easily for the first time in hours. “He's alive? How is he?”

There was a pause on the other side of the line, background noise pushed to the front. She could hear a number of people talking at the same time, mumbled voices of everyone surrounding JT. He was still at the crime scene. “ _He's in a bad shape,_ ” he finally said, honesty being his default setting. “ _EMTs tare taking him to the hospital right now. Meet us there!_ ”

That was all that Dani needed to hear before she jumped to her feet and raced out of that cursed abandoned building behind. The uniforms outside could keep it safe for the time being. If it was up to her, she would never set foot in that place ever again.

~º~

“What do we got?” the man asked, slapping a pair of blue gloves over his hands.

“Two male GSWs coming in with the EMTs,” the woman answered, pulling a surgical yellow gown over her green scrubs. “One to the chest, one to the leg.”

“Chest GSW is with me in Trauma 1,” the man called out to the arriving EMTs and police escort. “Leg goes in Trauma 2. Jena, you got that one?”

Jena gave him a thumb up. “Yeah, I got this, Mike,” she called out, following the second team of EMTs into the busy room, a flock of nurses and aids in their wake. Oddly enough, a flock of police officers followed as well, gathering around the Trauma 2 door, looking edgy and alert.

It wasn't the first time that had people brought in with a police escort. But until their lives were safeguarded and on the mend, the ER team didn't really cared about what they done. There were no casualties on the cops side, so that was always a plus.

“So, what do we know?” Mike asked as the one of the EMT's helped the ER's staff move the wounded man from their stretcher into the Trauma room gurney. The heart monitor stuffed between the guy's legs showed that his heart rhythm was much too fast and unstable for his liking. He moved to uncover the pressure bandage wrapped around the guy's chest, satisfied to see that there wasn't no arterial jet. “How long has he been throwing complex PVCs like that?”

“Just now,” the EMT replied. “Malcolm Bright, thirty one, chest GWS, no exit wound, no known history of allergies, long list of psychotropic medication,” he listed, handing over a scribbled piece of paper. “He lost consciousness on scene, hasn't regained it yet, but he's been responding to pain stimulus,” the man went on, watching as the doctor pried the patient's eyes open. “Besides the GSW, there's also a deep penetrating trauma in the left upper thigh. Looks older, but is still bleeding. We were barely able to find a vessel to insert the IV, but he's got a brachial access and we've been pumping him full of saline and Ringer's, but his systolic is still hovering under six. O2 sats have been holding steady at 80%. Also, his right arm appears to have a humerus fracture.”

Mike, focused on the chest wound as he was, finally took a moment to look at the rest of his patient. The guy looked like he had been put through the grinder and spat out the other side. Other than the obvious injuries that called for immediate action, he could see the multiples discoloration points on his body, already blossoming into impressive bruises. Some were so bad that he needed to check for internal bleeding. “Jesus... what happened to him? Mugging gone wrong?”

“Kidnapping,” the EMT supplied. “Kidnapper is the GSW to the leg in the other room.”

“Daa-amn!,” he let out slowly. That explained the police escort. He touched his stethoscope to Malcolm's chest, scrunching his nose. Breathing sounds on the left were barely audible. “Alert the OR that we're coming in with a probable pneumothorax! Also, we need X-ray in here, ASAP,” he called out, before moving to check the stab wound. “You guys did this?” Mike asked, pointing to the general state of undress of his patient. He was used to cut off, barely hanging clothes, but there usually was some form of clothing. And underwear. This poor guy was butt naked. Maybe some chemical spill?

The EMT shook his head. “Wasn't us. Guy was like that when we arrived. From the looks on the cops faces, whatever the hell happened before, it wasn't pretty.”

_Shit_. He really wanted to get this guy into an OR in the next five minutes. “Do we need to run a kit?” he asked grimily. 

Whatever the EMT was about to answer became pointless as alarms started going off on every single monitor hooked up to the patient. Mike took one look at the EKG line and cursed. “He's in V-fib! Get the crash-cart in here!”

The time for talking and gathering information was put on hold. Right now, Malcolm's heart seemed to have had enough of all the trauma his body had been put through and had decided to throw a temper tantrum. “Setting 360 joules... clear!” 

The paddles jolted under his hands, sending a bolt of electricity cursing through the patient's chest.

Mike stared at the screen, quietly counting to five, hoping that the chaotic rhythm would dissolve into a nice, sinus rhythm. 

It didn't. “Again... clear!”

The guy's chest was a mess as it was, between the entry wound and the bruising. He really didn't wanted to resort to chest compressions to get this guy back. “Come on, Malcolm... show us what you got, buddy!”

Despite the fact that he had done this more times than he could count, Mike would never failed to feel that sense of heightened suspense that slowed down time in between the defibrillator's discharge and seeing its effects on the heart's electric system. Like jump starting a car, he waited a few seconds, willing the ECKG lines to settle.

This time around, the wild zigzagging flat lined for half a second before giving birth to a beautiful, steady, sinus beat. It was over 130bpm, but beggars couldn't be choosers, so he would take it. “Okay, we're running out of time here! Let's get him upstairs! Tell Cardiothoracic that we're coming in hot!”

As they rushed out the door, heading towards the elevators, Mike caught a glimpse of even more policemen pilling around the lobby. One of them, an older gentleman with a white peppered goatee, was staring directly at him.

No. Not at him. There was such sadness in the man's brown eyes that he could only be looking at one place. The man on the gurney. Whoever Malcolm was, he was important to someone. People always were.

Mike wanted nothing more than to tell the policeman that everything was going to be fine, that Malcolm was going to pull through and make a full recovery. But he couldn't lie like that. “We'll do everything we can,” he promised instead, sticking to the truth.

~º~

  
  


Ainsley was getting sick and tired of hospitals. Most specifically, hospitals where Malcolm had been admitted to.

  
  


For close to ten years, her life had been happy and carefree. Her brother had been working for the FBI, always traveling around the country and she would see him mostly on holidays or on mother's birthday. If she knew her brother well -and she did- Ainsley was pretty sure that Malcolm had also gotten himself in trouble and hurt during that period. But, because he had been away, it had been easier to hide his hospital trips fromh is family.

  
  


Since he had gotten back to New York, this was the third time Ainsley found herself crossing the hospital doors, not knowing if she was going to find her brother dead or alive.

  
  


First, it had been the snake bite. And honestly, who got bitten by a frigging poisonous snake in the middle of New York City, other than Malcolm Bright, walking human disaster?

  
  


The second time had been a joint visit. Her concussion at the time hadn't help much with details on what happened, so Ainsley had been barely aware of crossing the hospital doors, but she did remember how awful Malcolm had looked at the time. All pale and bloody, swaying on his feet like a drunk man, nursing a frigging STAB wound like it was nothing but a scratch.

  
  


If that hadn't been bad enough, Malcolm had fallen yet again in the hands of another serial killer. When Ainsley got the text from her mother, warning her about what was going on, she could barely believe her eyes. Shit like this happened to one person in every ten thousand people. People won the lottery more often than they crossed paths with serial killers, and yet Malcolm had managed to do it. Twice!

  
  


Ainsley had done a segment on the Bone Crusher killings just that week. As violent and gruesome as those murders had been, they hadn't affected her all that much. After all, it was her job to keep her emotions at bay while reporting violent and gruesome events.

  
  


Knowing that Malcolm was going through the same things those dead men had suffered changed everything. She had spent the night at her mother's place, the two of them waiting by the phone, hoping that some good news would come.

  
  


When Gil had finally gotten in touch, his text had been short and strained. ' _We have him. Brooklyn Presbyterian.”_

  
  


There had been no details, no attempt at appeasing their worry, no faint wisp of hope. Coming from someone like Gil, who had always been there to take care of their messed up family, what was missing spoke louder than what he had actually shared.

  
  


Gil was waiting for them in the lobby, dressed in all black combat gear. In fact, there were a couple more policemen there in the same attire, standing on guard outside a whole section of the ER. The two detectives that were a part of Malcolm's team were standing beside Gil, looking as grim as their leader. Ainsley grabbed hold of her mother's hand, instantly knowing that this was going to be bad.

  
  


“Jess...” that was about as far as the Lieutenant managed to get before he crumbled on her mother's arms.

  
  


The sight sent chills up Ainsley spine.

  
  


“Where's my son, Gil?”

  
  


There was barely hidden panic in her mother's voice, a public display of emotion that Ainsley was not used to see in Jessica Whitly. What was worse, she had never seen Gil looking so broken as he did now. In fact, all three members of Malcolm's team looked crippled and defeated.

  
  


In her heart, Ainsley prepared herself for the worst. “Is he dead?” she voiced the words that no one seemed brave enough to speak.

  
  


“No,” the male detective, JT if she was remembering right, answered her. “But he's in a bad shape.”

  
  


“They were shocking him when we got here,” Gil confessed, finally pulling away from Jessica's embrace as her hand flew to her mouth in shock. “Took him upstairs shortly after... there's no news yet.”

  
  


“Gil,” Ainsley called out. “What the hell happened to my brother? Was it the Bone Crusher? Did you get him? Is he dead?”

  
  


She couldn't help it. Being a reporter wasn't just her job, it was who she was. Always wanting to know everything, dig the deepest details, never satisfied until she uncovered the whole truth.

  
  


“Ainsley!” her mother called out. There were veiled tears in her eyes. “Now is not the time. The only thing we need to know is if your brother will be okay... that's all that matters now.”

  
  


Ainsley pursed her lips. No one called Malcolm out when he used murder investigation to cope with his feelings and anxiety, yet when she was the one doing it...

  
  


“We caught him,” JT answered grimly, his eyes unconsciously moving to one of the trauma rooms in the ER. “He's not hurting anyone else ever again.”

  
  


Ainsley followed the man's gaze, her own eyes widening in shock as she connected the dots. “He's _here_?!! You brought the killer to the same hospital as my brother?”

  
  


“It was the closest hospital,” he explained, looking none too happy with it either. “He's not going anywhere from here, except for a life in prison.”

  
  


Ainsley would have given everything to get a look at the guy. A part of her was thinking of the kind of huge exclusive this would be, to be the one and only reporter to get a few answers from the Bone Crusher. Another part of her was curious to see what he looked like.

  
  


The only serial killer she had met in person was her own father, and he looked deceivingly like a sweet man. Despite all the horrible things that she knew Martin Whitly had done, he still looked like a dad, warm and welcoming in his sand colored cardigan. Giving off a sense of security that was nothing but pure deceit.

  
  


A part of her needed this serial killer to look like a monster. Because that would make her father _different_. Better somehow.

  
  


“Don't get any ideas,” her mother called out, pulling on her arm. “We're going up.”

  
  


~º~

  
  


When Dani finally texted back, Edrisa had been too terrified to read the detective's message. Her finger had stopped frozen on top of her cellphone, refusing all commands to descend and unlock the screen.

  
  


What if she had texted to say that Malcolm was dead? What if she was being called to the crime scene, to process Bright's body?

  
  


The possibility was bone chilling, making her heart beat widely against her ribcage, cold sweat making her feel clammy and disgusting.

  
  


Her phone chirped again, reminding her that she had an unread message, as if she had forgotten about it in the thirty seconds that had gone by.

  
  


Finally summoning the courage to make herself look at the screen, Edrisa opened the text message. Letters blurred in front of her, sudden unbidden tears and poor eyesight conspiring to draw out the suspense.

  
  


“ _Bright's alive. On route to the hospital.”_

  
  


Edrisa let out a tiny scream, suddenly very glad that there was no one there to see or hear her reaction. Taking advantage of the fact, she allowed herself a little victory dance. Bright was alive!

  
  


“ _Is he okay?”_ she texted back _._

  
  


It really was hoping for too much, but Edrisa had just received a massive discharge of serotonin and her brain was too high on happy juice to acknowledge any sort of bad thing at the moment.

  
  


Unlike the other victims, who had been kept for days, Malcolm had been in the hands of the Bone Crusher for less than twenty hours. There was a small chance that the killer hadn't even touched the profiler, that despite the awful name that the media had come up with, Malcolm's bones would still be all intact. Small, tiny chance, but one nevertheless.

  
  


Then again, he was being taken to the hospital, so there was certainly something serious wrong with him, something that the paramedics couldn't deal with on the spot.

  
  


“ _Brooklyn's Presbyterian Hospital._ ” Dani texted back, carefully not answering the medical examiner's question.

  
  


Anxiety once again reared its ugly head inside Edrisa's chest. Enough with the high-school messaging! She grabbed her coat and car keys and headed out the door.

  
  


~º~

  
  


Jessica jumped to her feet every time some one passed through the automatic glass doors that led to the OR section of the hospital.

  
  


When they had first arrived on the floor, someone had talked to her, too many words working their way out from the woman's mouth, none of them making much sense to Jessica other than telling her that Malcolm had been shot, that he was in surgery and that it was too soon to give her a prognostic.

  
  


Jessica didn't wanted a _prognostic_... she wanted someone to tell her that her son was alive and would STAY alive for many years to come.

  
  


_Informative_ as that had failed to be, it had been hours since anyone had given them any more news. And she was slowly losing her mind.

  
  


Gil had left at some point, returning shortly after with coffee and a couple of blanket for her and Ainsley, who had fallen asleep against her shoulder. It wasn't until the warm wool was wrapped around her that Jessica realized how absolutely ice cold she was. “What was it like?” she asked, her voice raspy from lack of use. “You know... when you found him?”

  
  


Gil exchanged a concerned look with the other two detectives. The woman -Dani- in particular gave her a startled look before quickly avoiding her gaze. Jessica wasn't her son, but she could read people just fine. The two of them had crossed paths in a number of times and Jessica was under the impression that Dani cared deeply for her son, a sentiment that, as a mother, she wholeheartedly approved. And yet, she was now hiding something that could help Malcolm. “You do know that I'm friends of the Police Commissioner,” she pointed out casually. “You can either tell me, so that I can properly prepare myself to help my son, or I can simply ask Jim for the official reports later.”

  
  


Dani wriggled the hands in her lap, loose curls hiding her face from view as she looked at her boots.

  
  


“Jessica... you know we can't share details of an ongoing investigation with anyone, especially you,” Gil pointed out.

  
  


“ _Screw_ that,” she hissed, careful to keep her tone low enough not to wake Ainsley. Despite what her daughter thought, she did watch her news segment. She had seen what that 'man' did to his victims, she had heard the theories and the speculation. She needed to know what that piece of shit had done to her son. “You know Malcolm. If—when he gets out from here, he will bury this whole experience so deep that you'll need a shovel to get him to talk about it!”

  
  


“He doesn't want you to know,” Dani let out, finally looking up to face her.

  
  


“Excuse me?”

  
  


The other woman took a breath, bitting on her lower lip as she considered her next words. “We had access to some _visuals_...during his--” she stopped herself again, leg bouncing against the floor nervously before she got to her feet. “Bright specifically asked that his family wasn't made aware of any details,” she let out, her words aimed not only at Jessica, but also the two men. “It's his wish, and we're gonna respect that.”

  
  


“Oh, God!” Jessica let out. From the way the poor's woman's face lost all color just from mentioning it, she figured that she probably wouldn't want to know any more details. Gently pushing Ainsley to lean against the wall instead, Jessica made her way towards the pacing detective. Without saying a word, she just stepped in front of Dani before wrapping the tall woman in her arms.

  
  


The detective tensed in her embrace, probably trying to figure out how to politely make her escape. Jessica, however, was having none of that. Malcolm had given her plenty of experience when dealing with fidgety people allergic to human contact.

  
  


When Dani finally allowed herself to accept the silent support and love, Jessica could feel her literally melting in her arms, barely able to hold herself up.

  
  


“I'm so sorry,” the detective whispered in her ear, her voice thick with unshed tears.

  
  


Jessica pulled away just far enough to look at the other woman. She could see from the bloodshot, puffy eyes, that this was not the first time she had gotten emotional that day. “Ignorance is bliss, my dear,” she whispered back. “I am sorry for whatever horrors you were forced to watch... but I am also grateful that my son had someone like you watching over him.”

  
  


“Oh! Are we doing a group hug? Because we're definitely in need of group hug,” a petite, Asian woman in a lab coat let out effusively, even as she neared the two hugging women to effectively join them.

  
  


“Edrisa?”

  
  


Jessica looked at the others, figuring that they all knew her. “I'm sorry, you work here?”

  
  


Edrisa smiled, extending a hand to her. “I most certainly do not,” she said enthusiastically. “I work with your son. It's a pleasure to finally meet you, Mrs. Whitly...even if the circumstances suck.”

  
  


“Edrisa...dare I ask why are you wearing your lab coat?” Gil let out, a faint hint of amusement in his voice.

  
  


Edrisa blushed, pushing her glasses up her nose before shedding the lab coat in haste. She hid all evidence of her 'breaking and entering' behind on the empty chairs. “Security wouldn't let me come up,” she offered her reasoning. “So...I used the back door.”

  
  


“You could have called one of us to come pick you up,” JT pointed out. From the look on the woman's face, the idea hadn't even crossed her mind.

  
  


“He's out of surgery,” she offered instead. “Someone should be around shortly to tell us how he is.”

  
  


Jessica blinked. “But you said you don't work here,” she reminded her, confused.

  
  


The woman merely shrugged. “I was too stressed out to sit and wait...so I _perused_ ,” Edrisa said under her breath, barely loud enough to be heard. “Did you know that the bullet passed just _inches_ from his heart,” she said with a touch too much enthusiasm, her fingers barely apart as she demonstrated how close Malcolm had come to die.

  
  


Jessica felt the world tilt, her legs wobbling like she was standing over a piece of giant bubble wrap. It was one thing to be aware of that fact that it was _bad_ , but to realize that Malcolm was alive by mere whim of destiny...

  
  


“Edrisa!” Gil warned, reaching out to pull Jessica to sit down before she fell down.

  
  


There was no time to recover, as a man dressed in pristine green scrubs walked into the waiting room. “Family of Malcolm Bright?”

~º~

Martin paced the edges of his cell, more than ever feeling like the trapped animal that they wanted him to be.

  
  


Ainsley had called. She had been the only one to remember him, to pick up a damn phone and warn him that Malcolm had been missing. That he was in the hospital. Again.

  
  


He ran a hand over his messy curls, resisting the urge to pull his hair out, feeling antsy and restless. Where had he failed?

  
  


If Malcolm hadn't made that damn call when he was ten, Martin would have been able to complete the boy's education, to mold him in his image.

  
  


Because someone molded in his image would never be this fragile, so consumed by helplessness, so vulnerable to being taken by serial killers.

  
  


It was the law of the jungle!

  
  


Malcolm had been born to become a lion, and yet he behaved like a feeble kitten! It was preposterous!

  
  


The tether pulled back, rupturing Martin's furious pacing. He yelled at the wall, angry at plaster and paint, when what he truly wanted was his hands around the neck of the man who had taken his son.

  
  


John had been a very naughty boy, pissing all over Martin's territory as he had, taking Malcolm without permission, trying to make him in _his_ image, rather than Martin's.

  
  


That had been a cardinal sin, one that Dr. Whitly would never forgive. Would never forget.

  
  


This killer...this _Bone Crusher_... He wasn't worthy of breathing the same air as a Whitly, much less touching a hair in his son's head.

  
  


Ainsley had promised that she would call as soon as she had some more news. But Martin was terrible at waiting.

  
  


He screamed again, just for the echoing sound to scream back at him.

~º~

Gil held the cold fingers between his two hands, content with the feeling of being able to do something for Malcolm. Other than hold his hand, there really wasn't much that he could do.

Bright was in the ICU, and would remain there for as long as it took for his damaged lung to recover and he could breath on his on again.

Until then, the hiss and pop of the ventilator had become a familiar sound to them all. “Come on kid,” Gil whispered, leaning over to kiss Malcolm's forehead. He smelled clean but unfamiliar, hospital shampoo and generic soap. “Come back to us.”

~º~

Edrisa had been the last one in, and even so, all the time waiting outside hadn't been enough to prepare herself for what she would see.

Instead, she stalled. She waved to the nurses station, she busied herself looking at the monitors, noticing the steady saturation, the regular heart beat, the still low blood pressure. When she found herself studying the ventilator's parameters and getting weird looks from the nurses, Edrisa figured that she had run out of time and turned to the bed.

That was not Malcolm Bright. It was the only conclusion that she could reach.

Malcolm was a ray of sunshine, a bolt of energy, a glimpse into a genius mind. He was motion and sound, going at a hundred miles an hour, running sprints around her head with his theories and profiling. 

This...was a pretense at life. A mockery that only serve to remind her that those she loved were just as mortal as the strangers on her table. “ _ How nice-- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive _ ,” she whispered. Her hand hovered above Malcolm's head, unsure how welcome her touching would be. After of second of indecision, Edrisa leaned in and tucked the stray lock of the profiler's dark hair back into its place. “Kurt Vonnegut said that, did you know?... you probably do. But he was wrong, right?”

~º~

Malcolm could count by the fingers of one hand the number of times waking up had been deemed as a pleasant experience. Almost all of them had involved drugs. Heavy ones.

He woke from a dreamless sleep, surfacing from an absolute void of light and sound to an watered down version of reality.

There was a constant bip-bip-bip sound keeping him company and the faint whisper of voices at a distance, which meant that there was more than one person around.

Malcolm wasn't exactly sure how ready he was to join the world. He was trying to gauge how bad his condition was, but his entire body felt numb and unattached. Like his whole being had been reduced to a head, lying on a pillow. A floating head, bouncing on the walls like a hot air ballon.

The image made him giggle for some reason. He tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry to produce any semblance of saliva.

Deciding that he needed some answers, Bright opened his eyes. Thankfully the lights were dim enough to make the experience mostly bearable. 

Malcolm was in a hospital room, but that much he had already figured out. He tried moving his hands, but neither budge from the mattress, both weighted down by something. He look to his right, finding a heavy cast surrounding his limb from shoulder to wrist, which explained why he couldn't move it at all. His left arm had a mop of brown hair attached. “M-mom.”

Jessica's head bobbed up so fast that Malcolm could hear the bones in her neck snapping. “You're awake!” she let out, tears welling up in her eyes.

Malcolm frowned. One would assume that was a good thing...Why was his mother crying then? The possibilities that popped into his drugged mind made him panic. What if the reason why he couldn't feel the rest of his body was not because of drugs, but because there was nothing there to feel? What if they had to amputate his leg?

A sudden image of the Professor stabbing him flashed across Malcolm's vision and he flinched, breathing coming faster, his whole chest on fire. An alarm joined the background bipbipbip, the noise soon becoming overwhelming. It was too much...

“No, Malcolm, baby, please,” his mother pleaded. “You need to calm down...everything is okay. You're okay.” 

Someone dressed in scrubs came in between his mother and him, gloved hands picking up the clear plastic tube going from his arm to a panoply of bottles and bags hanging above his bed. By the time Malcolm realized what that person was doing, it was already too late, as the drug had already been pushed inside his IV line. “No...I don't want to sleep--”

Bright was out before he could even complete the sentence.

~º~

Ainsley was checking her email account for the fifth time in as many minutes when she heard movement from the bed. It was easier to sit by Malcolm's side now that the horrible tube was out and the ventilator gone.

Still, he wasn't doing much of anything yet, except sleep and breathing on his own. Which was good, Ainsley was super happy for her brother.

But it was also very dull. 

On the bed, Malcolm stirred for a few more seconds before going under once again. “Come on, bro...enough with the sleeping beauty routine,” she teased him, grabbing hold of his good hand. “You don't even like apples...”

~º~

Dani would kill for a smoke. She had quit a couple of months back, right at the same time Malcolm had come into her life. And now he seemed to be the one pushing her back into smoking. “You need to wake you...for health reasons,” she warned him. “Or else I'm going back to that nasty habit.”

On the bed, Malcolm twisted his nose, eyes fluttering under his lids. Other than that, he gave her no answer.

“I hear you shot the guy...in the end,” Dani let out casually. She had been surprised when she had heard about that, initially assuming that either JT or Gil had been the ones gunning the guy down. She had seen Malcolm struggle to use the gun, she had seen him  _ choose _ not to shoot before and had wondered what had changed. “The way I see it, either you knew the gun was empty, or your aim really sucks with your left hand...which was why you shot the guy point blank. No chance to miss then, hum?” 

Either way, it made Malcolm one of the good guys. And she was okay with that.

Watching him laying there, free from pain and safe, was more than what Dani could have ever asked for. Every time she closed her eyes, she could see him bleeding on the floor, or looking at the camera, saying goodbye. And every time that happened, all she had to do was rush back to the hospital, enter his room and reassure herself that the past was gone and the future held much more hope.

~º~

“Bro, we got so much evidence against this guy that even the DA is trying to keep this off the court,” JT narrated cheerfully. “I mean, they are going to plead insanity and all that, but there is no way this guy is ever seeing the light of the sun, except filtered through metal bars!”

There was no answer from the other side, not even a smile. Then again, it was entirely possible that Bright wasn't listening to a single word he was saying. He leaned closer, eyeing the nurses nearby. “Dude...I gotta tell you...what you did back there? Shooting that guy even though you were half dead at the time?” he pointed out. “Fucking badass!”

“Sir... _ language _ !”

JT raised a hand in surrender. “Sorry, sorry... won't happened again”. He leaned back down, a proud smile on his lips. ”You're my hero, bro... know that.”

~º~

“That's it, kid!” a voice encouraged him. “Open up those eyes, sleepy head.”

Malcolm obeyed reluctantly. Sure enough, it was Gil's smirking face he encountered as his eyes managed to focus enough to form an image. “What are you so cheerful about?”

The downside of having both an arm and a leg in a cast, besides the obvious, was that Malcolm had found himself trapped inside the hospital, unable to make his escape without outside help. 

No amount of guilt tripping had worked effectively enough to get Gil, Dani or JT to spring him loose. His mother and sister were absolute traitors who simply refused to even consider the fact that he was better at home than in a hospital bed. And Edrisa, his only hope, was under constant surveillance, her hands effectively tied to help him.

So, he was stuck in there. There was a whole week after his abduction that Malcolm had absolutely no recollection of, hooked up to a ventilator as his lung healed, or so he was told. The week after that had been spent in a limbo of heavy drugs and glimpses of people who may have been -or not- by his bedside.

But now...two weeks later, they were keeping him in there just out of spite! So what if his chest still burned when he talked too fast, or that he got tired just from sitting up a couple of hours? It wasn't like hospital air came with magical healing powers and he couldn’t do his out-of-breath talking and old man fatigue routine just as well in his loft.

“I'm here to spring you loose,” Gil let out, presenting the clothes he had hidden behind his back. Normal, regular clothes, with BACKSIDE on them and all, unlike those dreadful hospital gowns.

“You're helping me escape?” Malcolm asked, eyes round and shiny, incredulous even as he pushed the bedsheets away. He had been begging him for weeks! “Thank you!”

“They called your mother, saying you'd be discharged today,” the Lieutenant confessed. “I'm here to take you to her place.”

The feeling of elation was gone. “No,” Malcolm let out, pulling the sheet back up. “I'd rather stay here.”

Gil scratched his ear. “Come on, kid, be realistic,” he let out. “How are you gonna climb those steps to your apartment with that thing on?”

Malcolm looked at the expand of white plaster attached to his left leg. As it turned out, the blade had done more than scrapping against his bone, actually chipping a piece off. Dragging himself through the floor afterwards hadn't done the hairline fracture any favors either. He sunk back into the pillows, knowing that Gil was right.

“Don't pout, city boy,” the Lieutenant warned warmly. “That thing comes off in less than two weeks and then you can retreat back into your bat cave.”

Malcolm smiled softly. “Its a first floor, hardly a cave.” 

The joke had started with JT, after he had taken one look at the loft. He had pointed out that, with all the sleepless nights, the load of money, the suspiciously large weapons' collection and the frigging butler, someone should check if Bright wasn't moonlighting Gotham behind their backs, fighting crime and all. 

After that, his cast had turned into a sort of art tribute to Batman, with various degrees of success. “I think I might actually miss it when it's gone.”

Arroyo's eyebrow went up his forehead. “That's just the drugs talking,” he concluded. “Come on, lets get you decent and on the road. Your mother might send the army after us if we're late.”

Getting dressed was, of course, an euphemism on Gil's part. The sweatpants he had brought were huge, large enough to fit the cast and with one leg cut off. They had to use a belt to stop them from falling down Malcolm's skinny hips. The sweatshirt as well had to be mutilated on the spot, because the only way to fit both his arms through the sleeves was if there were no sleeves. By the time he was done with that, pretended to listen to all the recommendations the discharge doctor came to tell him, and made his way to the wheelchair that Gil pushed to the waiting car, Malcolm was more than ready for a nap. 

“We're here,” Gil announced, gently touching his arm.

Malcolm startled awake, not really remembering getting inside the car. He looked outside, to his childhood home.

“Two weeks...I can survive two weeks in here,” he told himself, even though he wasn't fooling anyone. His mother could be a little...overwhelming when she was concerned about him.

A week in the Intensive Care Unit, watching her son slowly climb his way back to life, had done no favors to Jessica Whitly's mother hen tendencies.

“At least tell me I can visit the precinct once a day!” Malcolm let out as Gil opened the door on his side. He was flat out begging and he wasn't even ashamed of doing so. It was a matter of survival.

“Bright...we've discussed this,” he let out, helping Malcolm out. “No work until you have a full bill of health.”

“The one thing that isn't broken is my head,” Malcolm pointed out. He laughed bitterly as the words registered . “Well, no more than usual. I mean...I can still work, Gil! I can still help!”

“Help me up this stairs, for a start,” the Lieutenant huffed. He had the profiler's left arm draped across his shoulders and one hand holding the hem of the kid's pants. Still, it was a struggle to hop up those five little steps to get inside the house. “Your skinny ass shouldn't weight this much...”

“You could've called for help, you know?” Malcolm reminded him. Oddly enough, Gil had been the only one showing up to see him that day, let alone bring him home.

“Funny, those words coming out from your mouth,” Gil let out without bite. “Mr. I never call for backup!”

Whatever Malcolm's reply was going to be, it died on his lips as the door opened and they found themselves surrounded by exploding confetti and a tremendous screech of 'HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” at the top of everyone's lungs.

Bright's eyes bulged on his face and he shrunk back, willing himself to disappear from view. “Why?” he whispered so low that only Gil could hear him.

“I'm sorry kid,” he let out, truly apologetic. “Your mother and Edrisa joined forces and there was nothing I could do to stop them. Just say the word and we duck out of here in no time.”

In all honesty, there wasn't anyone there that Malcolm wasn't happy to see. JT, Dani, Edrisa, Ainsley and his mother. All of them were smiling, looking more rested and at ease than any other day in the past weeks. Maybe this was something that would help them heal.

JT and Dani had confessed to him that they had been the ones watching the video feed, that Dani alone had watched the final moments. At first, Malcolm had been just too embarrassed to consider the effect that something like that would have on them. All he could think of was of how low the two of them had watched him go, how weak he had looked in their eyes, how they had bared witness as he was used and abused.

Little by little, Malcolm realized that, no only their opinion on who he was hadn't changed, but also that he wasn't the only one carrying the scars of what had happened. There had been little clues that eventually made him realize that more than his personal embarrassment, it was the trauma that it had caused them that mattered the most. 

Little clues, like Tarmel walking into his room, carrying a plate of home made cookies that Tally had sent expressly for him, or the way the tall man seemed more open and careful of his words around Malcolm.

Big clues, like Dani just bursting into tears because she had moved too fast and Malcolm had flinched from her, or the way it had taken her over a week to finally meet his eyes.

Gil, sitting on the chair beside his bed, his gaze lost and away, looking straight through Malcolm, like he wasn't even there.

Gabrielle would probably point out that Malcolm was just using the others' feelings to avoid dealing with his own. But whatever the case was, Malcolm felt that he couldn't truly move on from what had happened until the others started treating him like a normal person, rather than some delicate, ancient papyrus that would crumble and turn to dust if ever touched.

He needed to feel normal. And that would never happen for as long as people insisted on walking on eggshells around him.

He wanted nothing more than to escape to his room, get in bed and sleep. But if he did that, it would only serve to convince everyone in that impromptu birthday party that he was broken beyond repair and that things would never return to normal. He couldn't have that; he couldn't deal with that. 

“You do realize that my birthday was...” he stopped, doing the math in his head. So much had happened since that day, so much water had rushed under the bridge. His body was still mending and he hadn't even begun to deal with what had been done to him, but still time had moved on, so fast. “...god! A month ago!”

He didn't feel a year older; he felt like he'd aged ten.

“Doesn't matter,” Edrisa said, carrying a cake in her hands. It was shaped like a large, yellow, bright lightbulb, with the letters 'HAPPY BRIGHT DAY!' written around the base and a single candle, sitting on top. “We’re celebrating life, and every day is a good day to celebrate life!” she added with a smile. “Now, blow your candle and make a wish!”

Malcolm smiled, blowing his candle. And he wished for...

The end


End file.
